Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp

Summary

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Episode Summary: Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp (Hosted by David Senra, Scicomm Media)

Date: July 12, 2026
Podcast: Conversations with the Greatest Living Founders

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Overview

In this thought-provoking conversation, David Senra sits down with Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, to explore how Ramp has evolved into a leading “smarter financial infrastructure” platform for businesses. Glyman shares his approach to designing products, managing talent, using AI, and aligning incentives—revealing Ramp’s mission to maximize every dollar and hour for its customers. The episode dives deep into topics like AI’s impact on business and organizations, product design principles, talent acquisition, and future trends in finance technology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. The State of Ramp & Its Mission ([00:09]–[04:34])

• What Ramp Is:
  Glyman highlights Ramp as a single platform for smarter business finance: cards, payments, procurement, automated accounting, and expense management.

  “You can make payments of all kinds... you can automate your accounting. The way all of these tools are built is meant to be a single plane for you to better run your business and get more value at every dollar and hour.” – Eric Glyman ([00:09])

• Impact & Metrics:

  • 70,000+ businesses use Ramp
  • 3%+ of all U.S. corporate card transactions
  • Average customer saves 5% on expenses and sees median revenue growth of 16%
  • Mission: help every business owner “get more out of every dollar and hour”

• Mission Internalized:
  Glyman draws parallels to iconic leaders like Steve Jobs and Toby Luque (Shopify), emphasizing a founder-led repetition of mission to align and inspire teams.

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2. Leveraging AI for Real Automation ([01:21]–[04:34], [10:15]–[14:43])

• Zero-Touch Expenses & Automation:

  • Ramp fuses credit cards, expense policies, real-time data capture, and accounting—in a fully automated experience.
  • Uses AI to minimize manual work and errors in expense reporting & bill payments.

  “We issue smart cards. Your expense policy drives how the thing actually behaves. You tap it, we check in real time, is it in or out of policy?... we write the memo, we push it into your accounting software and it's done. Zero touch expenses.” – Eric Glyman ([01:44])

• AI and Organizational Efficiency:

  • Automation extends to invoice/bill management, recommending better payment terms, ensuring accurate workflows.
  • The vision: financial processes that run on autopilot, freeing teams for higher-value work.

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3. Ramp's Product and Organizational North Star ([06:32]–[06:43])

• Clear Product Principle:

  “Is this saving our customers either time or money?” (David Senra, [06:43])

  • Glyman confirms this as Ramp’s guiding product question and describes drawing inspiration from Elon Musk’s first-principles thinking: eliminate unnecessary steps, relentlessly simplify, and then automate.

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4. Rethinking Talent in the Age of AI ([10:39]–[19:50])

• Agency over Credentials:

  • Ramp seeks out “spiky” talent—people with unusually high drive, even if unconventional or lacking elite credentials (e.g., Minecraft server creators, fringe community leaders).
  • AI increases leverage, so driven generalists can now out-compete specialists with the right tools.
  • Organizational barriers dissolve as roles overlap and individuals can extend their reach.

  “The most effective person is no longer 10x or 100x, it could be a thousand times as effective ... you design organizations with lots of subspecialties ... and I think you can radically simplify.” – Eric Glyman ([10:55])

• Finding High-Agency People:

  “I'm less interested in the resume. I'm far more interested in, like, proof of work. It can be an award, it can be something you've built.” – Eric Glyman ([15:32])

• Retention and Compounding Relationships:

  • Glyman values building a long-term core team for trust, velocity, and silent understanding—drawing parallels to Mr. Beast’s and Charlie Munger’s enduring partnerships.

  “You get to the point where [the team] doesn't have to call each other anymore.” – David Senra ([23:53])

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5. Product Design Philosophy & User Experience ([27:36]–[31:46])

• Consumer-Grade Design for B2B:

  • Ramp insists on “elegance of design”—clean, intuitive interfaces, even in business finance software.

  “If we want to have excellent standards. I love this idea of like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” – David Senra ([27:40])

  • Glyman gives the Breville Toaster as a metaphor: true design comes from observing what users actually do, not just responding to feature requests.

  “Great design is following an understanding ... no one is coming to Ramp saying, like, I want to buy a credit card, or can you build me a better expense app? ... we are trying to deliver a business that is easier to run, that is more profitable, that is not distracting you with, like, bullshit at work.” – Eric Glyman ([28:44])

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6. Aligning Incentives: ‘We Win When Our Customers Win’ ([31:46]–[38:19])

• Operationalizing Customer Alignment:

  • One of Ramp’s six values: “We win when our customers win.”
  • Every product is measured for the time and money it saves customers—tracked on internal dashboards, reported constantly.

  “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?” – Eric Glyman ([32:24])

  • Visible, shared scoreboards foster accountability and focus—modeled after lessons from Citadel and Amazon.

  “You should be focusing on the timeless if you're trying to build an enduring brand.” – Eric Glyman ([38:37])

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7. AI as a Paradigm Shift: Business Models and Token Spend ([39:56]–[49:22])

• AI: Fundamental, Not Just Hype:

  • Glyman compares AI’s transformational opportunity to the air conditioner: immense value accrues in the ecosystem, not just the underlying tech.

  “When you have intelligence that is accessible ... what kind of businesses are now possible?” – Eric Glyman ([40:32])

• Token Spend Management:

  • Ramp observes that a vast new business expense category has formed: payments for compute/tokens (AI inference/usage).
  • Observes rapid growth (e.g. Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenues), and helps companies track and optimize this spend.

  “There’s going to be a third mega category created around how do we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and, and done through these tokens.” – Eric Glyman ([43:52])

• Future: Self-Driving Money:

  • Ramp’s ultimate vision is an operating system for autonomous, policy-driven financial decisioning—where tools automatically allocate resources, optimize vendors, negotiate contracts, and close books… all with minimal human involvement.

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8. Competition in a Changing Landscape ([54:14]–[58:19])

• Ramp’s Real Competitors:

  • Contrary to perceptions, Glyman frames Ramp not as a financial services provider, but as automation for knowledge work—thus, their true competitors are AI labs, not just legacy banks or expense apps.

  “Early on we were bunched in with a lot of financial service providers ... really what we were trying to sell you was time ... automate and do the work around the money movement. ... I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider of this type of service.” – Eric Glyman ([54:41])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “A dollar saved is more than a dollar earned.” – Eric Glyman ([00:09])
• “Zero touch expenses.” – Eric Glyman ([01:44])
• “Our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and hour.” – Eric Glyman ([04:34])
• “If Ramp is successful, the median business using it can cut expenses by more than 5% per year—and outgrow the market.” – Eric Glyman (paraphrased, [00:09])
• “Proof of work ... that's what matters in hiring.” – Eric Glyman ([15:32])
• “I want to work with people for a long, long, long time ... when you've built the trust and you understand how to complete each other's sentences ... you're able to move faster.” – Eric Glyman ([20:31])
• “Great design is about observing people's real habits, not just responding to feature requests.” – Eric Glyman ([28:44])
• “We win when our customers win.” – Company value, as seen on Ramp merch ([32:06])
• “If you're trying to build an enduring brand, you should focus on the timeless.” – Eric Glyman ([38:37])
• “The most effective person ... could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area.” – Eric Glyman ([10:55])
• “The potential of AI is so great, it can blind people ... ask: what is now possible?” – Eric Glyman ([40:32])
• “Really what we were trying to sell you was time.” – Eric Glyman ([54:41])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment/Topic | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|---------------| | Ramp overview, mission, and current metrics | 00:09–04:34 | | AI-powered automation in expense management | 01:44–04:34 | | Company mission & product design North Star | 04:34–06:46 | | How AI changes talent & org structure | 10:55–14:43 | | Finding and nurturing high-agency talent | 15:32–19:50 | | Value of long-term teams/trust (Munger/Beast) | 22:31–24:06 | | Design: Consumer-level standards in B2B | 27:36–31:46 | | Aligning customer & company incentives | 31:46–38:19 | | The enduring nature of value (Bezos idea) | 38:19–39:02 | | AI as paradigm shift; token spend management | 39:56–49:22 | | Ramp's real competition is AI labs | 54:14–58:19 |

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Conclusion

This episode showcases Eric Glyman’s philosophy of first-principles thinking, customer-centric product development, high standards in team building, and relentless automation. Ramp’s vision is not just to streamline business finances, but to shape the future of work itself—where finance runs on autopilot, empowered (not threatened) by the new era of AI.

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Transcript

[David Senra]

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

[Eric Glyman]

You use ramp, and you know it. But let me just give you a snapshot of where we are. 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, 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 your business and get more value at every dollar an hour. The way that we measure ourselves is how many fewer dollars do our customers spend after adopting ramp and how many fewer hours are they using to go and run their business? Today, over 70,000 businesses use RAMP. Over 3% of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States are powered by RAMP. And nearly 1% of all the corporate transactions are running through RAMP. And I think the most piece of information is that like, you know, the typical business that adopts RAMP is able to cut their expenses by over 5% per year. And as you know, like, a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned. The typical business that adopts RAMP is growing their revenue a median of 16% per year. The U.S. average is 3 to 4%. And so we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further.

[David Senra]

You and I on our, when we're talking off camera, talk a lot about AI. The, 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 some of the ways that you guys are using AI and what are the products you're building.

[Eric Glyman]

One of the most, I would say, present experiences just the act of, let's say, do an expense report. So we'll go there, we'll talk about paying bills, we'll talk about closing your books. For many people, doing your expense is just the worst hour of your month. And if you think about it, it's sort of nuts that everyone accepts as normal that some company somewhere is going to issue you or your employee a card that, right, your expense policy is not going to drive. If the thing actually works, you're going to pay for a client dinner, you're going to get a piece of paper, then you're going to go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you, the employee, are going to go manually, do your expenses yourself. Kind of a waste of time. 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, your state, reviews this thing. It's a whole rigmarole ramp. We fuse all of it, right? And so we issue smart cards. 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. Often if you're a small business and let's say you receive an invoice from a vendor, it's 50 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? You're entering the itemized level details and it could be 50 clicks before the time you're done with ramp, you upload it. We check all those things, right? Do you have a contract? Was a service ultimately rendered? 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 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 something more like if there's car companies interested, like maybe a Tesla is designed to not just get you from A to B, but to drive you there without you needing to like, you know, spend your focus on it. Ramp is trying to do this for your financial processes. And the effect is if you're a cfo, it gives you one place where all the funds that are moving inside of your organization are being tracked or being accounted for. And ultimately we're recommending the next time where you can get more utility. At every dollar that's flowing through your org or hour is like how you can think about it.

[David Senra]

How do you describe the mission inside the company though? So like something that's very common, obviously. One of my favorite examples of this is like Steve Jobs, you know, would describe what he wanted to do. He said, use the same phrase when he was in his 20s, use the same phrase when he was in his 50s. He says insanely great products. He would just repeat, you want to make insanely great products, come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here. I just talked to Toby Luque from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company and the way it's spread throughout internally, it's like we're building infrastructure for entrepreneurs. So how do you describe it as a CEO to your team inside of Ramp?

[Eric Glyman]

I think our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar an 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 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 175 years late to was this was, I think, really inverting a lot of the way that many of our competitors had acted. Right? If you kind of look at the credit card industry, which is where we started, even just seven years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through these points and rewards programs. Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers will have your back. And it was, I think, exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs that I knew wanted. They actually wanted more in their bank account and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. And so simply by inverting that primary assumption and saying, what if instead of going and trying to 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 there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do? 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 Treasury? And ultimately, where it's led us is to build better infrastructure and kind of this substrate where your dollar's moving through it. But again, I care less about what are the dollars we're moving. But actually, how do we get more value from every movement that's occurring?

[David Senra]

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

[Eric Glyman]

That's right, correct.

[David Senra]

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

[Eric Glyman]

That is exactly right. And I think a lot of it, too. Like, I've been a. I mean, a huge fan of founders and what you've been building for years. Like, I think of Elon's algorithm as one that has been incredibly motivating and orienting and clarifying for us. Right. With every process of money movement or allocation of resources, resources or measurement of money movement that occurs inside of companies, we are trying to apply a similar philosophy of asking, whose requirement is this 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 amount of time it takes to develop a feature and then once we've simplified it, can we go and automate more parts of the process at the end? And what we are trying to do is take that methodology and that style of thinking 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 with less effort? That's really what we're trying to do. And the products we make are frankly just scaffolding in a form factor for us to go deliver that service to our customers.

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp.

[David Senra]

I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world.

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

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

[David Senra]

was reading the book 0 to 1.

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

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[David Senra]

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[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

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[David Senra]

so AI is accelerating. You guys are adopting every single new technology you possibly can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of late night dinners we have 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 that's running throughout the company.

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

Curious.

[David Senra]

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?

[Eric Glyman]

There's a few things that I think are evolving with AI. One, just the power laws are getting more extremes in the same way companies are getting larger, the speed to which companies are getting built is accelerating. I think the returns to talent is higher than ever. The most effective person in the world is no longer 10 times as effective or 100 times as effective. It could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area. So I think finding people 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 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 a very determined generalist can start to do much more than they used to be able to do. Right. To explain a bit more of what I mean, large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive. They've read more medical case texts than any doctor alive. They've read more company filings and 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? If I'm just stubborn, I can keep going and do this. And in a way, like, I think a lot of work over the past hundred years was you would have some craft or subject matter expertise that you were very, very good at. But once you hit kind of the boundary, right, you are a great engineer, but you enter into design. Say you can have your intuition, but ask the designer, or you can have your ideas, but go ask someone who's skilled at sales. And now, if you were stubborn enough and pushing and willing to start to go build systems, you can extend your boundaries. So the positive interpretation is you're not gatekept and you can do a lot more. But I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses is first, if you find really determined people with a high level of determination and an aptitude, 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 walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. And I think you can radically simplify.

[David Senra]

Wait, what does that mean, the barriers between organizations?

[Eric Glyman]

I'll put it this way. When ramp was call it 10 people. And you ask people, where do you work or what do you do here? They'd say, I work at Ramp and I'm an engineer. You get to 50, you might hear something simpler. I work at Ramp, and I'm in the SAL team, and you start seeing these different divisions grow. But once you start getting to like 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this 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. Salespeople talk with other salespeople. And you, you see these mega corporations. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel, where you know this. No one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers. Everything's hard because has to go up top and down on through. And these organizations become very Byzantine. And I think now in a world where someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track customers, that helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go, 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, I think, a lot of organizations right now to question, do I have the right shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into? I just find this whole field really interesting right now.

[David Senra]

I want to go to the shape of organization if you think you need to change it or not. So what I'm understanding from what you're saying is essentially you're looking 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 going to, like, ask for your credentials would be, like, completely ironic. And 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 going, 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?

[Eric Glyman]

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 1% or 0.1% 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 couple of these things, I think about there's an engineer and actually a whole litany now a whole community of people at Ramp who. We found them because, you know, when they were 15 years old, they were paying, playing like 80 hours, 100 hours a week just on Minecraft. And a few of them were known for building these private Minecraft 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 when he was quite literally very small, you know, and it turns out he knew all the other, you know, Minecraft developers. And you find these people he would have missed. Like, I think that a lot of traditional ways 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 bend the API to do things that we didn't know it could do because he was so discerning. And I think you can often find people with incredible spikes. 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. Through greats, it can be by 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 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 just remember meeting a lot of folks who just kept talking about, like, there's this guy making founders podcasts, 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. It can be an award, it can be something you've built. It can be like a great work that you read and say, this is electric. And so often I think I'm really looking for signs of that. And you can find that, I think by searching of where is work, where are people producing interesting 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 look for people who are very active on GitHub. We're trying to meet people who were leaders in different bizarre fringe communities. And it turns out too like even if you have a really intensive interview process and you have like 10 rounds of interviews, right, and you interview someone for 15 hours, it turns out in two business days of working with someone, you're going to have more information about working with that person. So we rely a lot on referrals. We try to find people 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 look, there's a lot of incredible things to work on in the world. I shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that people need to want to work 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 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. I think in some sense you and I, we only live our lives. Everyone in some sense is the hero of their own, own journey, 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 independence of what RAMP will do in 5, 10, 15 years? Where do they hope to be in 5, 10, 15 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 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, don't worry about it, don't waste your time. And so those are the two things that I spend a lot of time looking for when I'm interviewing people.

[David Senra]

That brings something I thought to my mind. I just had a conversation with Gustav, who's the co CEO of Spotify. And one thing that's remarkable about him is he had a startup, sold a startup, then goes to work for Spotify, then works there for 18 years, then becomes the co CEO stuff. And if you look at the top leadership in Spotify, hugely, I think he said something, 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 wanted to turn through people. What's your opinion on this? Do you want consistency on the top people in your company? Do you encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the core product kernel team together? How do you think about that?

[Eric Glyman]

I think that people's level of 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 who are the top 50 smartest people at MIT? 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. You can go and say, actually I'm going to try to find the smartest freshmen and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship and go bring them in and find the smartest and incredible aptitude of people. And by the way, other freshmen, when they see the smartest person went, they want to go to your company too. And you can start to create these virtuous cycles of finding great people. So I agree 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 quant firms, AI labs, whoever you name it. People are paying top dollar for folks. But that early in career is 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 and give them a lot more responsibility and 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 earlier in your company than they would have otherwise, they want to stay, they want to build it. And that leads me to my actual goal is I want to work very early with people and I want to work with them for a long, long, long time. Because I think when you've built the trust and you understand how to complete each other's sentences without the other needing to go do it. You're able to rely on each other. You're able to move faster, and you're able to communicate far more in a shorter period of time, which leads you to act with higher velocity.

[David Senra]

It's almost like that develops. So we were just talking right before we recorded that. A few days ago, I recorded Mr. Beast. 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 spent a bunch of time with him is he has this thing where it's just like, he has almost like there's certain. The people who've worked with him so long to the point where they used to live with him and then spend every waking hour with him, and he's like. 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. And he says, like, at his operations guy. I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly. He, like, walk on a set that just like the one you're on right now that Tyler does. And before Mr. Beast, like, looks at something or opens his mouth, Tyler's like, I already know what you're going to say. I did this reason for it. That light's over here for this. This camera is actually here. You think it should be over there. But the reason it's not over there is because if I position it here, it lets me shoot into here, here. And then he doesn't have to say anything. That's exactly what I would have done if I knew that. And he says, like, it's excessively important. He's like. And then he had a great line. He's like, you don't get there in 100 hours. There is something special about this. Like, I talked to Charlie Munger. I went to Charlie Munger's house right before he died. And the fascinating thing, one of the questions that one of these other entrepreneurs with asked him is like, well, how often you talk to Buffett these days? And he's like, we talked so much. We got to the point where we didn't have to call each other anymore.

[Eric Glyman]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

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.

[Eric Glyman]

It allows, I think, a much more pure pursuit of the mission because you understand why, 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 and push forward and what you can rely on another person to do. You. And I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies, when you have a really strong culture, you have really strong trust. 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. 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 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 question and fair one for folks of like, if I'm busting my ass and working super hard and like, you know, giving up on all the things that I am. And like, you're not, you know, there's all these folks free riding and you're not enforcing high standards. Why, why should we obsess so much over reaching our higher potential? This organization doesn't, doesn't seem to demonstrate a real respect for the pursuit of higher and higher standards and an intolerance for anything less than giving your best. Like, ultimately, I want to 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, Iron sharp and iron, you build better products faster. And so my whole job, I don't believe I'm the smartest person at ramp. Not even close, sadly, at this point, my job is try to create the conditions for people to do their lives work. And that involves finding great people, making ramp the kind of place that people want to 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 wrong fast, and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job, is to unblock these other people.

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[David Senra]

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[David Senra]

Six years old. How many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years?

[Eric Glyman]

It's just over seven years. 2,620 days, in case you were curious.

[David Senra]

There you go. 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 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. Believe that. I think that just speaks to you. Like if we want to have excellent standards. I'm going to 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 thick accent. I was like, what? What is that? I didn't know what a door where you can't tell if you push or pull it. Exactly. So he's like, I can't have shitty design things. So he had him removed from the Shopify offices because 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 one, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

[Eric Glyman]

It's totally right. And it's funny, like a group of designers were Hanging out the other day and I found myself in a very funny conversations. Have you ever used a Breville Toaster?

[David Senra]

No.

[Eric Glyman]

If you care about design, you're meeting all these people, you should buy a Breville Toaster. So 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 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 these tools. People who will maintain your database, they're horrible to use and as a result, like, you never want to go log in and you can kind of name what are the software is for salespeople, for HR people, for finance people. You name it, they're horrible. That's, I think, a lot of how people would describe B2B software. 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, I like toast, but sometimes I want to reheat pizza. I should have like a reheat frozen pizza mode. Or maybe, you know, you're cooking stuff and you want it to be more like an oven or you want to make popcorn and it's a toaster slash microwave and all these kind of things. And before you know it, you know, with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons 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 who thought about things, maybe like Toby did with the Norman doors. What he started doing is try to observe people toasting things. And if you watch people toast things, what they actually are doing, it basically falls into two categories. You hit start and either you've undercooked the toast and you need to put it back in for another cycle, or you've overdone it. In fact, 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 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 an understanding. It is like, no one is coming to Ramp saying, like, I want to 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 data is digital in the first place. You were. 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 a world that computers can think, your books should close themselves, right? And so a lot of what we were 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 don't know, distracting you with, like, bullshit 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, you have to be asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products.

[David Senra]

This leads me to another question. How do you align incentives with your customers? One of my favorite lines from 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 going to focus on serving the customers, and the money will take care of itself as long as you do that. Me and you were at an event. We were talking at an event together, I don't know, like, a month or two ago.

[Eric Glyman]

Go.

[David Senra]

You're sitting to my right. I look at, you're wearing, like, ramp 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. 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?

[Eric Glyman]

It's one of our six values. And a lot of companies have this idea. They want to have values. Everyone has. My elementary school had values, right? And what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, Sorry, if any administrators listening to it. 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 things 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, it's part of why we connect, right, to a company's accounting software to have kind of a source of truth, Truth as part of we move funds and then we explicitly create measurements on how many, like how many dollars did we block, 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 finance people whose time is wasted running pivot tables to tell you, oh, that's Uber. And we spent, you know, $50,000 this month at Uber with ramp. Part of why we built that was we discovered our end customers, their finance teams were just. And trying to do all these transformations. Simply say, oh, we spent money at Uber. Here's what we spent. And so part of what we did was after measuring, right? Where were people going, spending 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 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 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.

[David Senra]

A question on the scoreboard. They use the term scoreboard. How is this presented to your team?

[Eric Glyman]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

Is it an actual scoreboard inside of ramp?

[Eric Glyman]

Yes. Yeah. Ever. I mean, you can get it any. Any minute or. Or second of the day if you go on tour on our total dashboards or you can query. Ask one of our internal agents for AMP Research. Any question you want. How many dollars an hours did we save a specific customer? Show me all the ways in Italian. But effectively it's a data table, but

[David Senra]

it's inside a dashboard on their computer.

[Eric Glyman]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Have you ever thought about putting it on the giant. Like making a giant version on the wall?

[Eric Glyman]

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

[David Senra]

Yeah, I think putting that data in front, constantly reminding and putting it in front of your employees is super important. There was this. I did this episode on Ken Griffin from Citadel, and I think he was giving this lecture at Yale or maybe at Stanford, and he thought it was interesting. He went to. He actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco, and he's like, you know, there's a. There's not. Like you said, if you have 20 variables, it's too many. 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 screen in their headquarters. 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 said he drastically reduced their risk by just putting it. I think at the time, Citadel was in Chicago putting this giant dashboard, like, scoreboard in the office where everybody could see it. It's just constant reminders, like, you can't run from it.

[Eric Glyman]

That's it. And it comes back to, like, at the end of the day, people Love complexity in new things and new products. And the world is changing. There's nothing wrong with that. Like, in some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filings somewhere and you say, we're a corporation today, even though we're just people sitting around a couch 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. Like, how will we measure ourselves if we are seeking to be your best and get better every day? How should we think about that? And how can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard? And so, yeah, we spent an incredible amount of time on that. And at the end of the day, like, look, I don't know what ramp will look like exactly in a hundred years, but I think just as it was true 100 years ago, people always wanted more out of every dollar an hour. I think people will absolutely want it in a hundred years in whatever form that may take.

[David Senra]

And so you're speaking to this Bezos ide where it's like, yeah, one of the smartest things 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, because you know the customer is going to want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery.

[Eric Glyman]

That's it. That's it. And look, 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 some of the themes of this decade, but. 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 want to work on this for the rest of my life. Like, I, I love building this thing.

[David Senra]

You know, I'm sensitive to that question. Like, I talk to founders and they want to tell talk me. So we've talked about their company and like, one of the first things I always ask is like, is this the last. Is this your last company? Yeah, it's just like, that's the thing. I'm super interested because then all the good things in life come in compounding. And like, I get at. I was just at this dinner two nights ago and ran into the son of this 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. And he started that company, was 22. So that means he's a 55 years of experience in the same company. Yeah, it's like those conversations are so full, like insight per minute. Like you're not going to beat that at all.

[Eric Glyman]

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

[David Senra]

I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history that this time is different. Usually it's not different. I just was spending more time at Michael Dell the other day, and I figured, okay, you started to come when you're 19, you're in your 60s. He's had a man manage and thrive through all these different technological revolutions and everything else. I go, michael, is this time different? He goes, yes, it's actually different. They had a wonderful conversation about it. So I want to go back to. AI has to, I would imagine, in your opinion, and I've spent enough time with you. I think I know the answer to this, but I think it's going to change the shape of your organization, is it not?

[Eric Glyman]

I think this is a super deep topic and maybe we'll just start the highest level of. I think you'd ask, does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we learned about business? And I say this because I'll encounter engineers every month. On one side, you have people who are terrified. This is doom and it's going to be the end of business as we know it. At the other, you see almost this obsession with the labs and deep love of them. And look, I think there's something incredibly revolutionary going on. I think that some of the labs are going to be some of the best business 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 around this. And maybe, to use an example, let's talk about air conditioning. It's 95 degrees outside. We're not sitting here talking about, like the great robber baron you know, families of the air conditioning industry, right? And these great family fortunes of people who create 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 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 going to be one of the most revolutionary transformations in our life. I think on the scale beyond the industrial revolution, making goods plentiful, I think it'll make services is plentiful. I think it is interesting to go work on creating a general intelligence that is artificial for the world. But I think one of the more interesting questions to be asking is in a world in which 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? Just as there were cities and things created that were not possible for maybe the air conditioner and something as dull as that, I think that there are entire things that we can go do. When you have intelligence that 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, 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. As a form of like a distributed ledger to manage resources work. You know, there's records around this and there's a reallocation of these types of resources. And I think part of why we are so interested in payments 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 agents in general making purchases. And I think you'll need a better substrate 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 these 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.

[David Senra]

Talk about what you guys are doing. With tokens. Ben, this is very interesting.

[Eric Glyman]

Like, I want to 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. While we're recording this, the, the run rate revenue is over $50 billion a year. And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs are on track to do in revenue and call it a year's time, I think it'd be reasonably conservative at this point to say they're going to pass more than $300 billion a year in revenue, which is like 1% 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 cost costs. Every job you're doing has a marginal cost. And I think in a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, I'm just going to, you know, manage my payroll. And I have a philosophy about how I'm going to decide how much to spend on that. I'm going to manage my vendors. I think there's going to be a third mega category created around how do we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and, 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 said publicly that in a few months of the year, they had spent the entire budget they had allocated for AI spend spend in a quarter. No one has budgeted, like I can tell you five years ago, no company budgeted for this type of spend. 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 and D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that? And I think the really interesting thing that's happening right now is, is, look, most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models, right? These are sort of code word for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible. And maybe you use this for your most difficult types of ask and the really interesting thing going on and as this is going to too, you have this, the labs don't like the notion that these labs can be distilled. As you've noticed, it's not one supermodel. You know, there's a great model and 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 and Maybe costs right, 1/100th 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, you know, you could wrap these texts tasks to these lower cost models. And so part of what we and others are focused on 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 some sense are limited agents of our companies, right? If I'm on business, 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 $2 million Ferrari because I feel like it. I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board sign off or if

[David Senra]

I worked with you. We're, we're lucky enough to have this partnership with Amman. So let us film here when we're in New York in the Beautiful Man. I don't think you would appreciate if I worked at Ramp if I was booking the Amman hotel.

[Eric Glyman]

Probably not, you know, unless you close some great deals, in which case we can talk. What I'm getting at is like we built a structure for organizations to 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 $10 million 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 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 $100 per seat ramp can show them actually your price per seat is lower or higher, 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 because in some sense it's just your policies that people are applying to govern what you're going to spend on. And I think that's going to become software. And so part of what we're working to do 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, a of lot allowing intelligence to allocate resources for you, 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 the most worthwhile cause and the highest return on the dollar gets the dollar.

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[David Senra]

I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner and he talks about when he's doing these, he's trying to negotiate these Peace agreements. He doesn't start with, okay, let's do the smallest thing we could do. Let's start with the most ideal situation and work backwards from that. And he finds that he actually has more success swinging for the fences than if, hey, I just want you to stop doing this one little thing. My question to you is, as ramp evolves and these new technologies, you take advantage of all the new latest technology developments in your mind then it's not there now. But what is the ideal product? Is it literally self driving money? It's like you're not buying seats, software, you're buying work. What is it to you?

[Eric Glyman]

I think that's really well said. I'll just start with who we serve today. A lot of our customers or business owners and finance organizations. And I think like I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance and you know, back in college, like I remember that the things you'd hear from them, like the dreams they had is like, you know, I want to go be at the table where it matters, right? I want to be allocating resources to causes that are important. I want to help people understand businesses better so they can make better decisions. I want to create great products, products. I want to do things that are really meaningful. And you go study this kind of craft and trade of accounting, finance, whatever it may be and then you are really awakened to the reality that's like, oh no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is you're going to do the expenses, you're going to go and like take the bills and you're going to go process them. You're going to go rerun this analysis that we ran last month for you know, a liquidity roll forward or financial projection again for this quarter and you're going to spend like 80, 90% of your time just on rote recurring tasks. Because the machine 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, moving the payments, but also like have the audit trail know your policy is connected to your, your full financial data so it can know this dollar, did it make you more money or was it neutral or did you waste money by spending on this, Then suddenly, all right, the job starts to change from most of your time is looking backwards and very little is actually on 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 our customer, what are the great products that we're developing for 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. Yes, you can go and turn on RAMP and all of these things. Maybe, maybe you're a small business owner and you have an obsession, maybe you know how to make a great podcast, but you don't care at all, 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, I share a lot of common beliefs with folks like Toby who are trying to make entrepreneurship more accessible to people. I think people should be put in a position where technology and tools empower them to pursue their actual like mission, ambitions and dreams and purposes versus getting clogged with all the tedious work that tends to drag most people down and I think defines most of corporate life today.

[David Senra]

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 or Kareem have talked about this publicly, but who you actually look at as the competitors to ramp is not 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 lapse. Yeah. Can you explain why?

[Eric Glyman]

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, it we move funds, we're quite good at it. And people are often coming from legacy tools. And 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. They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, a larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan. Right. 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 we would move your funds. But the pain that people had was like, like it was a waste of everyone's time to do expense reports. It was a waste of time to go and have to tick and tie for every payment to close your books. Really what we're trying to go do is automate and do the work around 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 are serving and servicing for you. And I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider of this type of service. I think in some sense it could be labor, but it also could be knowledge work done in different ways. And so one, I think it's incredibly exciting. I actually get very energized having like great competitors and having great organizations to compete with. I think iron sharpens iron. I think it forces people to ask, 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 in my life. Like we've had five quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while you know, doubling the business and doing it at a multi billion dollar scale. And so that part of it has been incredibly energizing. At the other side of it, you need to think really carefully of, you know, these organizations. And I think humanity is on the exponential. Just a few years ago ago we were all shocked when AI could generate a paragraph that sort of made sense. It might have had some typos or things that weird, but it seems sort of human. Just a few years later, people quibble, you get 100 page dossier in some footnote is off or hallucinated. And I don't think there's any sign that 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'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. I think in some orgs maybe you can determine two months ago we wasted funds and with ramp, we're building kind of 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 I think we've ever seen.

[David Senra]

Thank you. Put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This was awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

[Eric Glyman]

Thanks a lot, David.

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I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 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.