Ramp CEO Eric Glyman: The equation for Hypergrowth

I believe we're a productivity company, I believe we're a workflow company, and where we compete, where others do not compete well is thinking about the cost of people's time, expense reports for a nightmare, people wouldn't do it. Welcome to Fintech Brain Food Interviews with Eric Gliemann. For the first episode, I wanted to go big or go home. I've used this company thousands of times in anecdotes to demonstrate what customer obsession looks like, and I have a "stick" where I take screenshots of the RAM product and show it to bankers because they can't be told what the future is, they have to see a competitor do it first. RAM has become known for expenses cards that just work, and while there are a few in this category known, have ever grown quite as quickly as RAM, it seems, and I've always put that down to some of the obsession. Obsessive on details like North Star metrics, how many hours have we saved per user, how many dollars have we saved per customer? So, I got curious, and I wanted to ask a lot of questions because it takes a lot of effort to make stuff look effortless. There's a lot to learn from how RAMP executes if you're in Fintech or in a bank, and today RAMP is obviously much more than an expenses card, and it's got a competitive landscape filled with very, very competitive folks like Brex, to name one, but also Mercury Arc and many others snapping at their heels. So, I want to start with Eric and RAMP, but I also wanted to get into the industry itself, and if in a post SVB world is Fintech here at stay, or you're just going to end up getting acquired by JP Morgan. So, Eric, welcome to the show, thank you for helping me kick things off here. Simon, thanks for having me, and it's great to be with you today. Thank you so much for being with us. So, very quickly, let's cover the law. How did you get to being on this podcast today? What's Eric before RAMP, and how does RAMP come about? So, the company that I started just before RAMP, in many ways, is the spiritual influence for what RAMP became. It was a company called Paribus. The premise was very simple. Let's say you bought something online at Amazon, Macies, Bloomingdale's, whatever, and the price of what you bought dropped online. All these stores guarantee that you could get the difference back. So, we built back in 2015, what was a very simple email app. You would just link your email and your Gmail Yahoo, whatever. That was all you had to do. Paribus within scan your inbox for receipts, track your prices of what you bought, and if you were eligible for refund, just email the store for you. The next day, you might wake up to an email for $50, $100, whatever back, and we kept to cut. Super simple business. An effortless savings was the idea. We launched that in May of 2015. Within a year, we grew to a million customers, and got what was a life-changing offer from Capital One, really the upstart credit card company in the U.S. to buy it. After a summer back and forth, we agreed to do it, and we spent the next two and a half years there, which I think were very critical to what RAMP became. I want to dive into that. That was brand new information to me, but my experience of Capital One culture is they obsess over details. Is that fair from your experience on the inside? Yes. The acronym is a little more unfortunate today, but they would use this term "IBS Information-based Strategies," and what they were really trying to do was, could you take pieces of information in order to make whether it was better underwriting decisions, better marketing decisions, you name it? They were originally very famous for the insight that you could have sloping of risk. If a customer was 10 points below the FICO score needed to approve them for a card, you didn't have to hard decline them. You could be running tests. You could maybe raise an interest rate, lower a term, or duration, and playing with different variables in order to find more. So, at their core, I think they really do drive based on heavy operational details, data experiments, and constantly trying to uncover the bounds of what's possible. Interesting how that led to a bunch of insights, I'm sure. Do you use some of those principles in day-to-day life? Where did the insight for RAMP come from and what did you draw from that previous experience? Definitely. I think it was two things working in concert. First was we were constantly thinking about savings and turning data into savings for customers. Over the two-and-a-half years that we were at Capital One, we scaled pairb is dramatically. It turned into what's now Capital One shopping, which is one of the fast-growing parts of that company. We felt we were scratching the surface of what's possible, and I'll come back to that. They didn't quite know what to do with us. Given we were an email savings company and they were a credit card company, so they said, "We'll put you in the credit card division and let you operate independently." It was fascinating for me. I was a FinTech outsider. I didn't really understand how credit cards and ecosystem worked. I got to see up close what made the model so elegant, what made the company so profitable, but also saw misalignments. There were a lot of really smart folks thinking a lot about how do you get customers to spend more on their cards, to grow purchase volume, which grows that income. There were lots of folks as well inside of the credit card division who were terrified of their rising costs of points and rewards and what it could do. We're trying to find ways to get customers to think the points were worth more and devalue it. Coming back to Creme and Gene and I, we were the savings people. We'd ask customers, "Did you want points? Cash back? Something different." If you really listen to them, usually what they would say is, "I'm actually just looking for more in my bank account." It felt that both sides were trying to smart each other. Customers were trying to max the value of the points and take from the bank. Credit card company was trying to get people to spend more than maybe they intended to. We just got stuck with this idea of what if there was a card and software that was intending to help you spend less. A dollar never spent on something you don't need is 100 times better than getting 1% back on it. You might be able to compete on the basis of value, money and time savings and break out of competing on price. That was the original insight that led us to, there might be something here. Then why B2B? Why not? Consumer. All sorts of reasons. Eventually, I think consumer is fascinating. I think it's a couple sets of things. Some of which is when you're really about to take the jump and start a company on your own. There's very few things that you can optimize. You have to constrain a lot of variables. I think one of the most challenging parts about starting a consumer fintech is the immense regulatory oversight, as well as the long and high risk involved with doing it. The way to drive at home is, if you were to look at the annual report of American Express in their corporate card division, they had loss rates of about 0.1% per year. When a dollar goes out, $999 come back. You would look at, in comparison, Capital One, maybe in the main street or consumer card division, all public, you might have $1,000 go out and maybe $950 come back. They would have about 5% loss rates. When you think about both, combined with the need to monitor what you're doing internally from the get-go, it means that not only are you trying to find product market fit, it makes something that's useful. You have to deal with lots of unpredictable averages. The lie would actually happen. You might have 20% loss months and 0% loss months, a lot of unpredictability versus in the corporate landscape. Simple, very clear. You're dealing with sophisticated entities and the other run into constraints, the variables, down to what we hope to compete on, which we can dive much deeper into, which is building a world-class product, just having great UX, fantastic workflows, in competing where I think most banks are not excellent. Which is making world-class products. Yeah, and I think that world-class product thing, probably worth contrasting what Expenses Card always looked like. If you're listening to this and you've never used Conquer or SAP Expense Management, a few people were using Expense Fi, talk me through that landscape and what it looked like pre-ramp. Definitely. A lot of this is steeped in the history, which if you were a bank in the US, you were allowed to move money. And if you were not functionally, you couldn't issue a credit card, you couldn't open a bank account. And so, as the world looked from no phones, the flip phones, the iPhones, your credit card, your bank never really changed. And so when companies were running us this question of, you know, the IRS is requiring us to collect receipts for transactions in order to be comply with Sarbanes Oxley in order to keep good books and records, all that kind of stuff. Amax didn't build it. Jason built it. Capital London built it. And so you'd have these aftermarket sets of Expense Management software providers sprouted up. These are SAP Conquer, Expensify, others that you cited. And when you follow that through to the user experience, what it functionally meant was you'd have companies issuing cards in one platform. They would send it to their employees. The employees would get a login or a card or something in the mail. Then to go buy something, they would swipe that card, maybe look up a card number, whatever it was. There's a 24 hour of data feed delay between, you know, when the bank ultimately sets the concur. So maybe you get your receipt. You log in a day or two later, because if you log in too soon, there's no expense there. You need to enter a bunch of information. There's a lot of loss of data. You go enter, you snap a foot of your receipts, enter some details, all that, and then ping some manager to review it. And so for one purchase, you have delays, and you have multiple sets of software involved just to buy one thing. Then of course, you link it to accounting. We'll go into all that in a little bit. We know this was crazy. You know, to buy one thing, it should be one place or ideally, you know, we like zero touch experiences back to Parabus. It was an effortless experience to save. We thought if you were, you know, on a first principles basis, if you were issuing the card, you could either A, you could text the card holder when the receipt is still in their hand. You'd have the information from the network. There's no loss in data. It's a much easier job rather than taking an image and trying to associate what could it possibly connect to. You just verified it. You've lots of details that can give you much higher accuracy. It checks it back and you're done. Before even better what we're doing today, you can pull receipts directly from merchants. You can pull receipts from Gmail from Outlook. So it's zero touch. We can get into it. But you could, you could eliminate lots of steps out of this painful or previously painful process. Well, nobody was doing product in that process. It was kind of the customer was the product manager trying to optimize it and you'd use a third party tool and trying to aggregate it yourself. And often that customer was not the budget holder inside of the corporation. And often the person that worked in accounting was not the budget holder inside of a corporation. So how do you invert that? I guess growing with growth companies helps. But what did your wedge look like when you were getting started in your early days of growing? I mean, this really was the wedge. The context and the history is fairly important for ramp story because we incorporated in March of 2019. And at the time the industry was already taking off. There were competitors, you know, on the west coast, middle of the country who would raise hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of capital. And we were this tiny company out of operating really for that first year out of an apartment in New York City. And so if our strategy was we were going to outspend, we were going to acquire, we're going to give points and all these things away, we will lose. And so we thought the only thing that possibly could work is two things. One, if we could align incentives, if we could truly design our business such that when we help the customer spend less money in time, we would do better. But then the other part I actually think was more critical beyond just being aligned and being able to be on the same side of the table. It was to build an extraordinary product. If we could acquire and work with some companies and have an experience that wasn't just good, but was, you know, to borrow the Apple Steve Jobsism insanely great that actually worked better, we might be able to have some word of mouth, some virality, all of that. And so when you kind of come back to it by the middle of 2020 is when we had finally cracked this, it was a card that could help you save. We helped the average business cut their expenses by 2% per year at that time. But the most interesting part was you could go to controllers and you could say you could replace this, you know, expensive fire can occur the software you're spending $5,000, $10,000 a year on Andrew hate. And that employees don't use with ramp. It works. It meets all the IRS requirements will pull in receipts more quickly and more dependably in a higher throughput than what you can possibly do on your existing app. Try it and let it in very quickly. We started seeing in our in our dashboards when you looked at the places that new companies were coming from. It was heavily word of mouth. Even to this day in 2024, about 35% of all new customers on ramp can be traced back to other customers telling them about it at some point in the conversation word of mouth and building great products is super relevant to how we grow. And so same is true for a lot of great companies, right? I mean, the early days of Monzo, they tell a similar story, but it often I find the old school banker will look at it and go, but that's a credit card. We have those we could we could build that they think about the financial product. So talk to me about what great looks like because it's kind of like trying to deconstruct athletic performance. You kind of you have to make it real for people almost step by step. So like what were you doing in the early days feature and functionality wise? That was different. Like it's IRS compliant. It's saving you money. Like what were the things that really caught on? Do you think that people loved because often they don't know how to tell you that, but what do you think it was? It's a great question. There were a few things that I think are relevant. One of which is maybe just stepping back. People think a lot in terms of just 1.0% this 2 x points on that whatever. How do these compare now that's a perfect analysis if people are working for free and they value their time at zero dollars per hour. But that's not the case. People have salaries an hour of people's time could cost $50 per hour. If you're working 40 hours per week, $100,000 per year could cost well into the hundreds depending on what you're going for. And when you start to remember, I think one of the core slogan for ramp time is money, say both. It starts to become much more interesting. And when you go back to this picture of what was people's lived reality expense reports were a nightmare. People wouldn't do it. Everyone kind of resented it and controllers who were highly educated smart people were reduced to traffic cops trying to get people to get their receipts in. Going deeper, assume you finally get all these receipts and you're not restating your books constantly to have journal entries and restate old transaction periods. People are turning in reports six months late. You need to tag transactions. And so when you start going into some of the early features that really took off these quality of light details. You know, days that were very simple. It would be, you know, people were working on Slack and teams and you could one click a controller remind everyone who doesn't have receipts. Please turn them. And instead of, you know, writing, copying, pasting, spreadsheets, one button, 40 different Slack notices would go out to people with exactly the transactions they needed. They could upload it. They were done. Okay, that comes in lightning rolls. This was back in 2020. Simple things. We saw that you categorized, you know, someone's in marketing and they are in the LA office. You set rules to categorize it once, ramp or remember it. You don't need to create lots of different rules and we'll show you that. And so it's really starting to follow through the workflow. I would pause on it because I think people think of ramp as a Fintech company and we've a lot of expertise in moving money and risk assessment. We can do all that. I believe we're a productivity company. I believe we're a workflow company. And where we compete where others do not compete well is thinking about the cost of people's time. And we'll go deeper but we save over 10 million hours of work and that matters to people. Well, I think it's an interesting North Star metric. The only other one that I could immediately cite was SpaceX uses a dollar per kilogram in space. And it just really concentrates your mind on what feature functionality should I develop when you have this metric that very clearly demonstrates success for your customers that drives them that word of mouth sort of flywheel that kind of comes around it. Maybe this is my ignorance, but you're the only other company I can think of where I can go. That is really, really clear. And the insight I can see how it kind of comes together. So that's powerful. And those features are the kind of features that sometimes feel like they're almost to a banker to the cynic that their gimmicks, right? I've heard bankers call that stuff a good luck and feel, but actually that's the difference between hyper growth and not hyper growth. That's the difference between good unit economics and not. But is there a fundamental tension between saving customers money and then you as a business one day being profitable? Like how do you get to scale in a point where you have different experience dynamics, but that is a very profitable company. Like how do you eventually move in that direction? How are these things compatible? Very much so. And I just want to pause on the previous line of questions. It's so important. And I think it's so underestimated by most companies. And the world will be better if people pay attention to it. So I hope other companies do it. Like I'll give you a detail from last month where today ramp is used in addition for cards, built payments, procurement, all that well into the thousands of reimbursements daily. One of the engineers started monitoring the logs of what happened when people were doing reimbursements. There was a slow function where basically we're verifying and validating that the receipt actually matched to the transaction and details into fully automated or previous AI script took about 30 seconds to run. You think about that. Let's say it's 5,000 reimbursements per day on that ballpark, something like that. That's called it 35 hours every single day being spent by our users across the base. The monitor of the logs and started realizing there was a much faster way to do this without losing accuracy. They took it down to about 5 seconds. So a gain of 25 seconds from 30 to 5. Now for users, it feels much more magical when you start adding it up every single day. That's about 30 hours of that 35 shaved off. And you coat back to what does that turn into. That's about 450 days a year for our users in time. They're not waiting for this to be logged and done. They're going back in these little details when you're doing lots of reimbursements really start to add up to a different experience. And I would argue people's scarce resource in 2024 is time. There's people constantly competing your attention. I think it's super important. And so you can feel it. I think it's the same reason when you open an iPhone. The box drops very slowly. It seems crazy. But it says something that they care so much about what is going to be like to unbox it. That you know some of the other and cares about the product. And so if there's one thing I hope people take from it. It's that the experience is everything. It really matters. And I think our industry is totally underestimated it. The difference between good and great is always in the details. And you the great athletes to the ones that you know you can get 80% 90% of the way there but to really be top performance. It's all the tiny details and the form fixes and everything that kind of make that big difference. I'm actually going to stay with you on product for a little while. And we'll run back to the business in a little while because I do think how the sausage gets made is the most interesting part of our business. And I'm obsessed with it personally. So how do you think about the vendor stack and the process of making the product because frankly you've outlined something where you're getting closer and closer to the customer. That's one route to my mind. My analysis the market is you've two choices in Fentec. You either go closer to the metal or closer to the customer. Closer to the metal. You're more of an infrastructure provider. You want to be a specialist. You want to be great at that. You're dealing in the fine margins. You're dealing in scale. The opposite is to get closer to the customer. Obsess over every detail. Go wide. But then perhaps you can you also get closer to the metal at the same time or is that a distraction from mission. That's kind of my question. So how have you thought about who you partner with, how you partner and how he that enables you to scale. It's a really good set of questions. And so I think there are varying strategies ours was certainly. And I think this has been consistent between both ramp and a pair of us. There are companies that compete on completely new vectors of technology of making infrastructure that much more efficient. And when you look at ramp, it's actually recombinations of platforms that functionally exist everywhere. But put back together in such a way to be vastly more efficient. I think there's many extraordinary businesses like that. I think you talk about SpaceX earlier in Tesla. I would say they famously work this way. They did not reinvent rockets. However, they did make it vastly more cost efficient and performant. And I would argue that ramp was very much that way. At the very get go, the idea of a credit card was very old. The idea of sending a text based on some action was old. The idea of connecting an expense management software to accounting was not new. But putting all of these back together optimized for the experience of, you know, can you underwrite someone quickly, issue them a card. Text their employees. I need a receipt connected to accounting and be done. I'd never been done before. So it was reforming all of that. And so in that context, what we were trying to solve for is what sets of vendors would allow us to be close to the metals such that we could issue this and generate this really well crafted user experience was super important. And then in critical areas that we needed to compete and we can come back to that, do we have a deep enough relationship such that if we need to modify and change things out, we could something you asked as we were kind of preparing for this was like, how does it look? And you know, there's the set of vendors that are, you know, pretty important. If you want to issue cards at the time we started just on Marquetta. We work with Stripe as well. They're both fantastic for card issuance and what was really unique about their capabilities versus the thesis, the, you know, the Pfizer of other folks. Galileo's that that were there before they allowed just in time transaction approval. So we could set card rules and we were able to get to the metal and modify that we had to underwrite folks. We underwrite folks based on cash balance. So you could you could use a plaid, a finicity, a teller, something like that. You know, we wanted to create credit tapes. Some of it we built internally later use finally we can go through all the pieces of it. But beyond just picking market leaders part of what we look for was with people at the other end if it was critical and we needed to modify it, would they care. And in some cases if you could be their most important customer or their fastest crew and they would actually built things for you. And so we actually it's funny like we don't outsource vendor selection. It's actually something still you'll even find Kareem is my co founder and and me in certain areas weighing in on it. You can really get asymmetric upside by picking the right partners early on to not just help you restitch together the sets of technologies that you need to do. But that you can actually even bend and inflect the road maps of these companies to be more useful to you if you can get both right. You can do more with less our engineers can be working on the user experience making things more intuitive not on both infrastructure and product the same time. That's what we're trying to get to. Back in the comic book, the great piece API is all the way down and described strippers hiring the Colossans to run your finance team. It's like a department you hire as an API is the phrase I've used. But the department you hire as an API is not something that is just an API. There are humans over there. And you can help drive their road map, especially if you're driving them significant volume. So that's an interesting way to think about partner with a capital P, rather than the word partnership, which gets thrown around, which actually means we signed a contract and there's some sort of sale and PR around it, which is a fundamentally different thing. All right, so the other side of product, I want to think about like what is your dashboard look like because you're looking today you mentioned a number of the metrics. What are you looking for at the CEO level and what are your product managers thinking about day to day? I think something that gets lost a lot in company building is people look just to outcomes and outputs. And at the end of the day is founders of a company that is how anyone you're asking for for money or time meet me evaluate it. Outcomes matter how quickly are you growing which cash balance when you build like there's a lot of output outputs you can drive to day to day we do not look at output metrics. We look at inputs one of the critical things we did really early on was trying to really map and understand what is our business equation. How does it really work if you were to distill it down to its most important elements and you know we could describe a few different ones for flows it if that's useful but what we do is once you really well understood your business. All you would be doing is monitoring how are you leading indicators your inputs tracking each week because they're much more tractable it's very hard to say you know I want to grow revenue by by 10% this week. Extremely hard because revenue in our case might be a product of how much did people spend which relies on how many people signed up what percentage of the cards have been deployed are people used to it yet what are they bought. Like there's all these things the marketing effective there's all these things that happened months ago that's finally leading to the outputs now. And so it drives team crazy to focus on outputs but I can have a really productive conversation of how many people drop their email this week how many sales calls did we have how many sign of so what was the conversion and I can start going down to folks in the business and start to have really useful. Sets of conversations of how do we improve that and that goes all the way through that that'll go to you know how is the customer service experience going how efficient are we per ticket you name it but I actually think to drive incredible outputs you have to clearly model your business and manage to the inputs. Double click on how you did that initially I love that phrase thinking about your business equation. Do you have an example of your business equation so it sounds to me if I if I could just say it back to you that you think about like the number of sales reps calls the number of whatever that like there are all of these these inputs that create the equation but like just work one through for me. 100% so maybe I'll start with like and this was in our very first board that when we were four months old we tried to model actually how does ramps business work because we were new to to fintech we were trying to onboard people who never knew about how to credit cards work and we tried it to still the logic and what we were going to do down really simply so if you want to grow let's say you know net revenue margin it is really a factor of maybe three to four key variables. One is purchase volume how much are people putting on your cards and you can talk about what leads to purchase volume times interchange rate how much are you collecting per swipe. Less what's the cost of funding processing for us the you know if you want to make three million dollars you might have to go through 100 million dollars so it's progressively high and if you kind of go and take those purchase volume times interchange less finding costs you get to maybe a simple net margin. You could always add rewards cost if you're doing that to you but you kind of get it and when you started sitting OK how to all these things work and how do they improve something interesting starts happening if you want to grow purchase volume straight forward bring more customers larger customers higher percentage to spend great if you want to grow revenue grow volume next interchange rate. It weirdly gets higher and higher the more volume that you get make sense you can negotiate for more maybe with partners and so strangely if you want to go interchange rate grow volume. Funding cost if you go to a bank and say I want to borrow 100 million dollars versus 10 million dollars you almost certainly will get a lower rate if you borrow 100 you have lower losses which so if you want to lower your funding cost grow volume and so if you start actually observing really what are all these things doing how they interplay there was one variable that mattered way more than most which was growing volume and so all we had to think about is what can we do to make a product that people will want such that will have you know ramp is a card of choice for people to use. Then you can start going deeper into what are the drivers of volume that's sort of straightforward it's you know it's how many customers do you have how large are these customers what percentage of maybe their their budget. They're a car budget are they spending with you and you start going into like what drives all this and then eventually you can go down into okay you know I've a sales development representative I've an account executive I have some onboarding flow and I can start actually mapping this out I can see a relationship with the number of meetings that someone has the number of closes that we have I can see you know how effective are we if we have 100 deals come through are we closing five or 10 why did we win why did we lose. So on and so forth and by then you can break it down where suddenly an SDR knows like what I need to know is this and if I do this job I can focus on excellence and getting down to getting going from 80 to 90% to 100% excellence and you're no longer back to your your football analogy and sports analogy Simon like I'm not you're telling my team you're going to train today to go in the super pool all we're doing is saying you know what we're going to run a hundred meters. In this time and we're going to speed it up we're going to lift this much weight and we're going to lift five pounds more than 10 pounds more and doing that and you can get down to level you can finally do something about it so get up my soap box but I hope that's useful and getting down to it. I run a weekly rant on purpose because my soap boxes where I live and I'm there with you on that soap box at 100% the idea that it's about progressively getting a little bit better out of each of the call metrics. The head of sales at sodium miles is a sports guy right and I think sports analogies do work really well because successful people successful teams have a lot of similarities to them and the ultra successful ultra competitive spaces kind of kind of do that so. So to round us out on products how do you think about who owns feature development what is a be testing look like how do you product managers get something in the hand what what is that look and feel like day today. So it's a combination of things so one of the most useful things we did early on is trying to back into OK what are the outputs that we're trying to solve with the mission of the company maybe in the early days we are trying to back into maybe this upward. So if we build something that's useful people will spend more with us what's useful we believe and we we still very much believe. A product that makes it easier for people to not just spend but to spend less money and less time was very important so if we got that right we believed it would dry purchase volume which would drive our revenue which we could optimize a lot of it so everything was sort of anchor to this upper level goal of how do we increasingly say people money how do we increase. People money how do we increasingly say people time now let's go into features and like who owns it which is exactly you know which you ask so if you're starting to study this question of like where are our buyers finance teams maybe business owners spending too much money in time you can start really studying this question of on a car today where is waste coming from and you may be able to go and turn this into sets of features people can pro stuff and see right and we can go into a framework to kind of test this. Mechanically what we're trying to do is first have a product that works get into people's hands and we're getting lots of areas a feedback along the way product is the one often driving the road map we're saying here's the goals here's what we're trying to go and amplify up to engineering is working to figure out to do that mechanically we're translating it into into into tickets. But what we're trying to to really measure against in every week we have sprints and when we're running them they're in there in two week increments I would say what's we try to do is do a couple things first drive outcomes how much time and money did we save how much did we ultimately release. But what we're measuring is and really tracking internally is is two things you know beyond the outputs first inputs are we good at understanding what we said we were going to do is what we actually did. It's important I would say in driving a sense of just you know consistency and clarity. So product manager can own the road map but they can work directly with engineering to ship it they have this north star set of metrics that they know they're looking for and you're kind of trying to be driven about how they push that out to production. And I guess then feedback is is everything whether it's coming in the data whether it's coming directly from customers whether it's coming that way and other product managers hands on with that they're working with customer success like what does that look and feel like. Yes so for example if you get an NPS survey from from time to time Simon and if you put like a you know a bad rating on one of the products and asking us 0 to 10 how useful did you find it. A product manager will reach out to you and ask you for you. And so if it's an area of ownership for a product manager and you were having a negative experience you will get a reach out customer experience and tickets all that is not own under operations it reports into product. We believe that every time that someone writes in with an issue or some paper cutter speed bump we think there's 10 to 100 times as many customers who had the issue and never told you when you go back to we're trying to say people time and money you have people who are organized and oriented against this they're trying to. You know every ticket is is a sign your product is not as intuitive as you think it is we're trying you know if you put you know customer experience and operations an SLA might be how quickly to do salt tickets if you put customer experience under product the question is how can you make these problems go away. Which is fundamentally different to how it was organized historically and I think the I love that idea of being obsessed over paper cuts and as a speed bumps like those are the things that are the clues to where your where your churn risk is going to come from right and that's those are the things that you can do to get better on product listen. We could probably spend another two hours going on this so I'm going to have to pull us away for products I'm curious about some some other things just to just kind of round us out a little bit. What I get into like your observations as a broader industry starting with your competitive landscape like V2B Fintech kind of crowded don't if you notice people seem to be attacking it from everywhere and everything what gives you the right to win and where are you trying to get to with that. I mean I think it should keep getting busier I think despite Fintech being arguably first or second large as part of the U.S. economy financial services you know health care and financial services being so large it's it's been concentrated in a set of players who are not into it I think it actually has a lot of room to go in a lot more room for addition so I'm excited about it. When I go back to right to win we tried early days to think about what made our competitors great and I actually think it's having the humility to think about. Assuming our competitors are very smart and are very extremely well run what do they do well because I think at the at underneath at all it's it's often true and we'll start with the card in industry. I think American Express is one of the great brands top 10 brands of all time I really think so I think if our business plan was we were going to do marketing and branding and points better than them we would get schooled. I think chase amazing at distributions and how some way you might find yourself as a chase customer or walking into one of their branches capital one amazing at risk and under writing. It's not say we didn't think about these things but the idea that that was going to be our edge and we were going to do that better was going to be tough what they all have challenges around there's both good reasons and perceive reasons internally why they're slow but this was one of the things that most viscerally felt a capital one was it is extremely hard. To iterate on technology and on products there's a lot of reasons for people may be worried about data architecture often things aren't really built internally at these companies there's a lot of consultants and clients outside of it so mechanically even if you wanted to you couldn't. But we said you know what frustrates people is is not that they can't make a purchase that they can't close their books on time is that they're not that they can't spend is that they're spending too much on sets of software. We have to be able to build a better product that saves people time and money better than they can. And so when you go back to even what we're organized around is how quickly can we ship product how much time and money do we say people and my deal is be be fine at the rest learn and understand what others are doing very very well but have a zone of excellence that is both important but very structurally hard for your competitors to deal with. You might be able to build something that is new and different and you know I think it's a big part of the story. What's the ballpark look like for you I mean in terms of major releases in 2023 I we had a hundred and fifty and we can go to what those look like in terms of minor it means shipping a production is during a week dozens of times per day. And so it depends right like I was at an event a couple weeks ago someone said I love the app but you know when I go to hit a memo it's right below the screen I'm on and I'm in an old iPhone and we said yeah jeez you're right I sent it to to the iOS team that night you know we push the fix of the app store you know it was done and I think if it's simple things that are fast. High degree of impact short time I think you should completely minimize in a time I think that for longer releases that deep maybe will affect. You know hundreds of thousands of people it should be very well tested and I would apply a different standard to each. There's a difference between how quickly you can get to production and how quickly you should get to production. If I would speak to the folks at new bank you know they often say the same thing which is you know like you can be shipping multiple hundreds of times per day if you need to like if the ship really hits the fan. But also you you shouldn't ship everything that quickly but what's the reason I highlight that is because. You know I speak to banks who are trying to get to out of a quarter they release cycle into a monthly from a monthly into every two weeks and you know this is this is just kind of a different world that you live in from the incumbent financial institutions. And you're not necessarily what I heard in you sort of opening about the competitors is you're not necessarily worried about the B2B Fintech companies because they're sort of competing to do similar things you're worried about the incumbents and how do you how do you have a competitive strength there which which kind of makes sense. And you also sounds like less worried about what's going on outside the window more worried about customers which is probably a good idea but what are the material risks to ramp like is you look out now over the next one three and five years. Like what are you what are you worry about what's keeping you up at night. I think when you're a founder it's you have a visceral reminder of this every day but all the company is at the end of the day is the collection of people. That's it right you can add capital you can decide how you spend your time but it's it's just like are you attracting some of the world's most talented people. Is there a clear North star and do they feel like they're actually doing the best work of their lives full stop and so what I fear is the day that we lose that. That suddenly extremely talented engineers say you know what I I don't think this is a company worth my time I don't these problems are important enough and I'm going to go somewhere else and sure you can you can grow you can make profit you can optimize costs but to build something great. I think being a test destination for you extraordinary builders and engineers designers is super important I would say is the biggest thing. That's a powerful statement as a person who's worked in multiple big companies and smaller companies and seen that transition across across various ages of company and I think that's something I mean again not to have to tip them too much but it's studying one of the things the reason I joined is primarily the people like great everything but. Have you met soups he's lovely and if you met the people and that's such a big thing when you're a founder and there's there's hard things as double hard things and there's responsibility of CEO and founder where you feel like everyone's your family and you've hired these people when they start leaving you it's hard not to take that that kind of personally I guess but I'm curious what motivates you and the team like is this North star really compelling to somebody who's new or does it feel a little bit like you've made a really great story out of bookkeeping you know like is this this. This should be dull this should be not saving lives here like how do you get people to that about this how do you stay motivated by it well I mean I think back to the why a space exit a great company we talked in a couple times they certainly have made advances in their field the biggest is they've made the you know the cost per kilogram you know to get something in the space drop dramatically it's putting things back together in orders and it's the small details it's the boring stuff. I would argue that suddenly means we have multiple launches every week from you know people are talking about going to to the moon and Mars again and I think that it actually is the mundane you know when you think about what creates wealth it is productivity gains it's allowing people to do much more with less and when you think about creation of wealth and improving lives think there's enormous benefit and I go even deeper like I grew up in Las Vegas and I was thrilled to learn a couple months ago there is a charity organization out out there not a partnership for homeless youth and there one of 20,000 plus customers that that use ramp and use it very deeply it's it's a small team dealing with extremely hard and personal problems and the team you know the camp manager was spending time with them and I'd be happy. To send you what they shared made the rounds kind of internally but what she said is it made the difference you know it took what used to take in terms there's a lot of governance that goes into running a nonprofit what used to take 20 to 60 days to clear a purchase to get the requisite approval to deal with a youth in crisis who it's the center their life to now it's it's days and they're spending time not dealing with the internal crap and craft there instead actually pursuing their mission gets us really excited and I think about at the end of the day what are we you know if our mission is to save companies time and money and we're successful in doing that and we're giving our our customers more time back in their weeks to deploy it towards their mission more money they can use not on wasted SAS subscriptions or buying things that don't need but towards their mission I think in some sense more an amplifier were parts of these companies missions to and I think making a world more productive so we we get really excited about that. The ability to ground it in real life and real customer stories is kind of powerful. All right let's let's look out of the next time horizons pick your favorite like what are your priorities over the coming days weeks and years like what what's next for ramp because you guys do a lot more than expense management today but might be worth just sort of talking through some of those other products and then you know what does expansion look like for you sure we're known for of course cards expense management accounts payable extremely quickly growing which will go deep into procurement is something we spend a lot of time when you're dealing with a 10,000 plus 1,000 plus employee person organizations how purchasing decisions get made and so of course we have lots of direct products like that. We do a lot on accounting automation price intelligence is one of the most important areas of investment it's not just here buying sales force license but how does that compare to the rest of the economy think of it almost as a true car or a ways for for buying things. What I would say over the coming years becomes really important just as we went from expense management accounts payables it started with controllers saying this is making my life so much better for card and reimbursement purchases but I spent a lot on bill payments and checks and all that too. Your accounting rules help me save time on this I wish it helped me save time on these other air purchases and we just follow the customer home we saw what they were doing in their workflows and we started adding and see you get a compounding effect not just within a product but as we're launching new products we don't just want to add new skews and lines of business we want to reduce the number of things and tools that people need to use on the other end it's what's underlying and so there's lots of areas we want to understand how people get more out of their own. Get more out of their procurement spend their travel spend the yield of what they're they're making on the accounts to so much more when you think about all the paper cuts that steel money from companies bottom lines we want to help plug it and increase efficiency of their systems. Maybe speaking to somebody in the United Kingdom don't know if you notice the accent is the job to go global or is there still so much room to run I guess the answer is following your customers if there's enough demand you follow them there but like how do you think about that kind of expansion is that even on your radar or is that something way beyond. So today I look this up before over the past 30 days ramp customers spent an over I think there's 130 countries we move money reimbursements payments abroad so in some sense like we can support global. Great companies like shop if you had quartered in Canada operations all around the world functionally support these organizations. There's this interesting other test of okay what about ramp UK for UK based companies with the UK base sales for when are we going to get into that and so there's there's two sets of things that we're trying to trade off and think about one can you just be good but not just good but truly excellent is is a very hard test I think in the US. It's public we generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue our market share it's debatable if it rounds closer to 0% than one at this point but no matter how you cut it we have 99% plus of the markets ago I think there's a lot of strong draw to stay focused on true excellence and becoming the you know the namesake I do think that international is extremely interesting because a lot of at some parts of the market. A lot of the pinpoint for global companies and again I'm in New York you're in the UK today business is much more done like this with with people collaborating from around the world is you get to larger companies it's inevitable so a lot of the poll from the businesses supporting multinationals and at some point I would say look I I think we can't have the impact that we want to do without going abroad it's just really a question of order operations. Makes complete sense my question was partially selfish as somebody who operates sort of multiple accounts from multiple parts of the world but you know so Dean is a ramp customer so I do get to experience the product day today so there's that and is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I had just to kind of round us out. I think today was just just fast like I really enjoy I hope it's useful for people where their aspects of the conversation Simon that you wish we had time to get into that maybe we glide it over or we want to double down but I thought this was actually pretty expensive. Yeah no I wanted to spend more time on the product and we did which is awesome and I nearly skipped past it so I'm glad we did that and the other thing is you know we could talk forever about what life was like after SVB but I'm sure they're going to make a movie about that or a documentary. It's on point so we'll we'll just save that for the documentary version so no if that's the case then I'll round it out Eric thank you for joining me thanks Simon was awesome. This was huge for me like I'm a product upstairs guy at heart I get excited by what's possible. I love conversations where I get to learn so this really meant a lot Eric thank you for joining me and thank you for listening if you are listening to this. Remember to tell your friends to leave a review helps others find the show and remember to tell everybody that like Fintech Brain Food has a podcast now. You can find me at Sway Taylor on Twitter or the blog at FintechBrainFood.com and if people want to learn more about ramp where do they go Eric? Just visit ramp.com we'd be thrilled to help you out today. Thank you ever so much. [Music]