They Built Ramp Into An $8 Billion Company In Under 3 Years: The Inside Story Of How They Did It

Tags

Top Highlights

• how we could use data on people's behalf to help them spend less and save more money

• From that, we learned that the inputs and outputs are very nonlinear—that there are some things that are just dramatically more effective in your business

• For us, a lot of the team is pretty young, but we try to find people with super steep slope and spiky personalities and prioritize that over intercept

• Often people have real gaps and that's okay. As a founder, you can construct the right team to work around people's gaps and make sure that their skills are complemented

• When we started Ramp, that experience made us really think about how we could help people

• In that way, it felt that the incentives of credit card companies and people were very misaligned—that each was trying to make the other worse off.

• Whereas with all the innovations in fintech, I think we were approved by Visa on day 50 of Ramp’s existence

• We actually onboarded our first customer in August 2019. And so we had customers and were working through to understand the experience, even prior to launching publicly

• points are marginal. They don't change the long-term outcomes of companies. But helping companies be financially more efficient was much more important.

• We did this by issuing as many cards as a business wants, being simple and unambiguous, and offering 1.5 percent cashback on anything—no games that we're trying to play or strange incentives that we're trying to introduce to our customers.

• time savings

• lock a merchant on a particular card

• different SaaS products charging the company across tons of people in the organization

• It wasn't just an admin and a cardholder and a bookkeeper. But you can have people reporting to other people

• We were also the first in the industry to propose a manager role.

• We've generally tried to be a lot leaner and are big believers that small teams that are well-organized and have clearly-defined goals can outperform large teams

• We look for people who care deeply about that mission and believe that those who take ownership don't want to let other folks down.

• You see other folks working hard and you want to be there for customers and for others

• Most products, I think, are very “blah,” especially in finance—and they’re not really that helpful

• I really do love the money and time saving stuff.