The $44 Billion Company Automating Your Company's Finances

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.

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 out of every dollar and 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 useful piece of information is that the typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over 5% per year. And as you know, 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 US average is 3% to 4%. And so, we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further.

You and I, when we're talking off camera, talk a lot about AI. 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, which is a great line that you have. Talk about some of the ways that you guys are using AI and what other products you're building.

One of the most present experiences is the act of doing expense reports. We'll talk about paying bills and closing your books. For many people, doing their expenses is just the worst hour of their month.

If you think about it, it's nuts that everyone accepts as normal that some company somewhere is going to issue you or your employee a card, or your expense policy is not going to drive how the thing actually works. You're going to pay for a client dinner, get a piece of paper, then go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you, the employee, are going to manually do your expenses yourself. It's a waste of time. You could do it that day, but you probably do it a month later, and it's an hour of your time wasted. Someone in another city or state reviews this thing. It's a whole rigmarole.

At Ramp, we fuse all of it. We issue smart cards, and your expense policy drives how the thing actually behaves. You tap the card, we check in real time if it is in or out of policy, and if it is, we pull the data from the merchant, process the transaction, write the memo, push it into your accounting software, and it's done. Zero-touch expenses.

It's similar for paying bills. Often, if you're a small business and 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 this vendor is, why you owe them money, and whether they delivered the service they promised they would. You're entering the itemized details, and it could be 50 clicks by the time you're done.

With Ramp, you upload it, and we check all those things. Do you have a contract? Was a service ultimately rendered? All the fields are entered for you, and if you change something, the next time you get a similar invoice, it's done correctly. The effect is that 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.

The effect is something more like this: a Tesla is designed not just to get you from A to B, but to drive you there without you needing to spend your focus on it. Ramp is trying to do this for your financial processes. If you're a CFO, it gives you one place where all the funds moving inside your organization are being tracked and accounted for. Ultimately, we're recommending the next place where you can get more utility out of every dollar flowing through your organization or every hour. That's how you can think about it.

How do you describe the mission inside the company? Something that's very common—and one of my favorite examples of this—is how Steve Jobs would describe what he wanted to do. He used the same phrase when he was in his 20s and when he was in his 50s: “Insanely great products.”

Yep.

He would just repeat, “If you want to make insanely great products, come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here.”

Yep.

I just talked to Tobi Lütke from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company, and the way it's spread throughout the organization internally, is: “We're building infrastructure for entrepreneurs.”

So how do you describe it as a CEO to your team inside of Ramp?

I think our mission is endless. It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and hour. That's what we're trying to do. The credit cards that we offer, the expense management, the bill payments, and the accounting automation—these are just products.

At the end of the day, for all the dollars that have passed through your organization, we are trying to make sure that fewer leave your organization at the end of the month and that you get more for every dollar and every hour. That's what we are trying to do.

I think what made Ramp start to scale very early on in a very crowded industry that people thought we were 175 years late to was that we were really inverting a lot of the ways that many of our competitors had acted. If you look at the credit card industry, which is where we started, even just 7 years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through points and rewards programs: Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers. We'll have your back.

It was exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs I knew wanted. They actually wanted more in their bank account, and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. Simply by inverting that primary assumption and saying, “What if instead of trying to get you to be a little bit worse off by spending more than you intended, 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 look at expenses and say, “Why are there 2 systems involved in buying every single thing you do?” It's part of why we said, “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?”

Ultimately, where it's led us is to build better infrastructure—the substrate through which your dollars are moving. But again, I care less about what dollars we're moving and more about how we get more value from every movement that's occurring.

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 and new features. The question you ask yourself first is, is this saving our customers either time or money?

That's right. Correct?

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

Yeah. That is exactly right, and I think a lot of it too, like I've been, 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 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 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 and a form factor for us to go deliver that service to our customers.

I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, 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.

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So AI is accelerating. You guys are adopting every single new technology you possibly can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of the late-night dinners we have are about this.

My question, though, is that I've met so many people at Ramp. You guys hire for spikes, and you see this because so many people were either former founders who now work at Ramp or used to work at Ramp and then started companies, right? So you have that very entrepreneurial lifeblood running throughout the company.

I'm curious: Do you think about talent differently now because so much of your work can be, or is, supplemented—in some cases, replaced—by AI agents? How are you thinking about hiring now, given the capabilities of AI compared to, say, 2 years ago?

There are a few things that I think are evolving with AI. One, the power laws are getting more extreme in the same way companies are getting larger. The speed at which companies are being built is accelerating. I think the returns to talent are higher than ever.

The most effective person in the world is no longer 10 times as effective or 100 times as effective. They could be 1,000 times as effective in a particular area. So I think finding people who are very spiky in certain areas is absolutely right.

The thing that I think has bent my mind most over the past year is that, 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. 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.

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.

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 a doctor at all, right? If I'm just stubborn, I can keep going and do this.

In a way, I think a lot of work over the past 100 years was built around having some craft or subject-matter expertise that you were very, very good at. But once you hit the boundary—you were a great engineer, but you ventured into design—you'd say, “You can have your intuition, but ask the designer.” Or you could have your ideas, but go ask someone who's skilled at sales.

Now, if you are stubborn enough, keep pushing, and are willing to start building systems, you can extend your boundaries. The positive interpretation is that you're not gatekept, and you can do a lot more.

But I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses is, first, that if you find really determined people with a high level of determination and an aptitude—just 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.

Then I think it leads you to question how you design organizations with lots of subspecialties, which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. I think you can radically simplify.

Wait, what does that mean?

Yeah.

The barriers between organizations?

I'll put it this way. When Ramp was, call it, 10 people, and you asked 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, and you might hear something simpler: “I work at Ramp, and I'm on the sales team.” You start seeing these different divisions grow.

But once you start getting to 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this inversion in identity. People say, “I'm a salesperson at Ramp.” “I'm a designer at Ramp.” They start to identify by their craft, what they do, and what they're asked to do. They interact mostly with people who are in their craft. Salespeople talk with other salespeople, and you see these megacorporations.

It's kind of like the Tower of Babel, where no one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers. Everything is hard because information has to go up top and down through, and these organizations become very Byzantine.

I think now, in a world where someone who develops the product can use technologies that help them sell more effectively, track customers, track outreach, and write with a better pitch on the first go—and these are real tools that you can build for people today—you start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations.

It's leading 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.

I want to go to the shape of the organization, and whether you think you need to change it or not. What I'm understanding from what you're saying is that, essentially, 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 liked. It was Tobi talking about this, and he said, “Listen, I'm a high school dropout. The idea that I'm going to ask for your credentials would be completely ironic.”

The way Shopify does it is, when they're interviewing, he says, “I want you to tell me your life story.” In your life story, if you're a high-agency person, you're going to have examples of, “I ran into this blockade, and this is what I did to get over it.”

So they have high-agency people reveal themselves through the telling of their life story. How do you do it?

There are 2 things that I'm generally looking for. One, I completely agree with Tobi. I think you're trying to look for some evidence of a spike or some level of exceptional drive.

I think there are many people in certain fields who can be in the top 1% or 0.1% in some field. But 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 an engineer—and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp—who we found because, when they were 15 years old, they were playing 80 or 100 hours a week on Minecraft.

A few of them were known for building these private Minecraft servers that were so entertaining that other kids loved to play on them. One of them paid his way through college—hundreds of thousands of dollars—by making something that was entertaining. He became a small-business person when he was quite literally very small.

It turns out he knew all the other Minecraft developers. You find these people whom you would have missed. I think a lot of traditional ways of looking for employees would say, “They don't have a college degree. They aren't well-rounded in all these ways.”

But he has this incredible focus and drive. If you talk to the other folks who were in the community at the time, people would say, “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.”

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 grades. It can be people who didn't have any of these credentials but are somehow out there making and putting out incredible work.

I think even just about you: You sat down one day a decade ago and said, “I want to make incredible podcasts.” For years and years and years, you were working on this. I just remember meeting a lot of folks who kept talking about, “There's this guy making the Founders podcast, and it's really good.”

It's all to say, I'm less interested in what the résumé is. I'm far more interested in proof of work. It can be an award. It can be something you built. It can be a great work that you read and say, “This is electric.”

So often, I think I'm really looking for signs of that. You can find that by searching where the work is and where people are producing interesting achievements, awards, and bodies of work, and actually starting there and looking for that.

And so part of our hiring process is actually going and 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. It turns out that even if you have a really intensive interview process and 10 rounds of interviews, and you interview someone for 15 hours, in 2 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 some asymmetric information about who someone actually is versus who they present themselves to be. I think the next thing that I specifically spend a lot of time looking for is that there are a lot of incredible things to work on in the world. I shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that people need to want to work for Ramp, or whatever it is that we're working on. You could be working on making humanity multiplanetary. You could be working on artificial general intelligence. Why should I assume people should be interested in what we're doing?

I think a lot of that starts with asking, "What is their actual motivation?" In some sense, we only live our lives, right? Everyone is, in some sense, the hero of their own journey, of their own story, and I try to spend a lot of time—forget even some of the capabilities—thinking about what someone wants independent of what Ramp will do in 5, 10, or 15 years. Where do they hope to be in 5, 10, or 15 years? What drives them? What motivates them? Does that coincide, and can I see and understand how it could coincide? Can I present it as, "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 clear evidence of why they might want the same thing and how it can connect, don't worry about it. Don't waste your time. Those are the 2 things that I spend a lot of time looking for when I'm interviewing people.

That brings a 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 that he had a startup, sold a startup, then went to work for Spotify, worked there for 18 years, and then became the co-CEO. If you look at the top leadership in Spotify, it's usually—I think he said something like a decade is the average amount of time they've been working together.

On the other end, you have people like Elon, who just want fresh blood. He says, "I want to churn through people." What's your opinion on this? Do you want consistency in the top people in your company, or do you encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the core product kernel team together? How do you think about that?

I think that people's level of experience can change, and you can learn unique things, but I think general aptitude is reasonably consistent. 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.

Generally, people are not recruiting for their internship programs until their junior year or junior summer. But you can say, "Actually, I'm going to try to find the smartest freshmen and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship," and bring them in and find people with incredible aptitude. By the way, when other freshmen see that the smartest person went to your company, they want to go to your company, too. 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 something like a mispricing in the market. By their junior summer, or after they've been working for 5 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 their careers, when people don't have a résumé, you can start to break it down. 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 than maybe they're used to. When they work a significant number of hours and do great things despite their age, and then build experience earlier in your company than they would have otherwise, they want to stay. They want to build it.

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. I think when you've built the trust and you understand how to complete each other's sentences without the other needing to do it, you're able to rely on each other, move faster, and communicate far more in a shorter period of time, which leads you to act with higher velocity.

It's almost like an ESP that develops.

Yeah.

We were just talking before we recorded. A few days ago, I recorded MrBeast. The episode's not going to be out for several months, for reasons that we can't disclose. What's fascinating about him, and I've spent a bunch of time with him, is that he has this thing where there are certain people who've worked with him for so long that they used to live with him—

Yep.

—and then spend every waking hour with him. You're not talking about 100 hours. In some cases, this is well over 10,000 hours that they've spent working together.

Mm-hmm.

And he says his operations guy—I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly—can walk onto a set, just like the one you're on right now, that Tyler has set up, and before MrBeast looks at something or opens his mouth, Tyler says, "I already know what you're going to say. I did this for a reason. That light's over here for this. This camera's actually here. You think it should be over there, but the reason it's not over there is because—"

Yeah.

"If I position it here, it lets me shoot into here." Then he doesn't have to say anything. He goes, "That's exactly what I would have done if I knew that." He says, "It's excessively important." He had a great line: "You don't get there in 100 hours."

Yeah.

There is something special about this. 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 the other entrepreneurs who was with me asked him was, "Well, how often do you talk to Buffett these days?"

Yeah.

And he's like, "We talked so much, we got to the point where we didn't have to call each other anymore." His whole point was, "I already know. Buffett knows. He used to organize his thoughts with me. Now he knows what I'm going to 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."

It allows, I think, a much purer pursuit of the mission, because you understand what each other is pursuing, what that mission actually means, and what the impact is if you're successful. You also know what you're excellent at and can take and push forward, and what you can rely on another person to do with you.

I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies with a really strong culture and 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 the organization gets is radically higher. So I think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue.

Lastly, I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization is have folks who are getting paid similarly, have similar ownership, and are simply not pulling their weight. I think it leads to this very tough—and fair—question from people: "If I'm busting my ass and working super hard, and there are all these folks free-riding and you're not enforcing high standards, why should we obsess so much over reaching our higher potential?"

This organization 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. 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, and get better at the things that we do.

When you have an organization filled with people who share that set of beliefs, iron sharpens iron. You build better products faster. My whole job—I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp. Not even close, sadly, at this point—is to try to create the conditions for people to do their life's work.

That involves finding great people and making Ramp the kind of place that people want to come to do their great work. Once they're here, it's ensuring that they're able to do incredible work, make decisions quickly, see if they're right or wrong fast, get products into people's hands, and move. That's my job: to unblock these other people.

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Ramp is 6 years old—7. How many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years?

It's just over 7 years, or 2,620 days, in case you were curious.

Okay. There you go. So, 7 years ago, and you guys had this from day 1, where you're doing expense management, corporate cards, B2B, but you guys had a love and insistence on elegance of design, almost at a consumer level that you didn't see in—

Yeah.

B2B software, which is still talked about to this day and has been copied by many other companies.

Sure.

That just speaks to you. It's like, if we want to have excellent standards, I'm going to quote Tobi for the 3rd fucking time in this podcast, but he even goes, “I hate these goddamn Norman doors.” He has a thick accent.

Yes.

I was like, “What is that?”

Yeah. I didn't know what that was, and it's a door where you can't tell if you should push or pull.

Exactly.

And so he's like, “I can't have shitty design things,” so he had them 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 we have to adhere to.” I love this idea that the way you do 1 thing is the way you do everything.

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.” 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.”

You and I were at an event together, I don't know, a month or 2 ago. You were sitting to my right. You were wearing Ramp merch, and I grabbed your sleeve because I wanted to read what was on it. It says, “We win when our customers win.”

Yeah.

I believe that to be true. How do you align the incentives of your company with your customers to make sure that stays true?

It's 1 of our 6 values, and a lot of companies have this idea that they want to have values. My elementary school had values, right? What I didn't like about the values at my elementary school—sorry if any administrators are listening—was that there were 20 of them, and I couldn't remember any of them.

What we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask, “What are the very few things that all of us really agree with?” If we don't all strongly feel this and agree with this, it's a nice idea. You can go pursue it, but it's not an actual value.

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, how many dollars our customers were spending and how many we blocked. 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?

It's part of why we connect to a company's accounting software to have a source of truth as part of the way we move funds. Then we explicitly create measurements of how many dollars we blocked, how many expense reports we automated, all that.

All we do each and every month is look at the scoreboard, and we ask, “Did we, in aggregate, save customers more money? Did we save them more time? And for individual customers, did the experience get better or worse?” Our job is to make sure the products that we build ultimately ladder back to that goal.

For example, automating merchant matching. Often, if you look at your credit card statement today, for most people, it's a string of text, and it's inscrutable. It'll say “UBR STAR 478,” and you have finance people whose time is wasted running pivot tables to tell you, “Oh, that's Uber, and we spent $50,000 this month at Uber.”

With Ramp, part of why we built that was that we discovered our end customers' finance teams were trying to do all these transformations just to say, “Oh, we spent money at Uber. Here's what we spent.” After measuring where people were spending their time, we built software to automate that for them.

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?

Flash forward 7 years. Today, any customer you talk to who uses Ramp will tell you, “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 get better at it each and every month. 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.

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

Yeah.

Is it an actual scoreboard inside of Ramp?

Yes. You can get it any minute or second of the day if you go onto our internal dashboards, or you can query or ask 1 of our internal agents, Ramp Research, any question you want. “How many dollars and hours did we save a specific customer? Show me all the ways.”

It's tallying, but effectively, it's a data table.

But it's inside a dashboard on their computer?

Yes.

Have you ever thought about making a giant version on the wall?

Yeah.

It’s on the wall.

Okay.

It’s reported out in the largest channels in Slack. It’s something that we talk about, frankly, every month. It’s part of why, 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 it, or how many dollars we’ve moved, but how many fewer dollars and hours we’ve helped organizations spend.

Yeah, I think putting that data in front of your employees, constantly reminding them and putting it in front of them, is super important. I did this episode on Ken Griffin from Citadel.

Yeah.

I think he was giving this lecture at Yale, or maybe it was Stanford, and I thought it was interesting. He actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco.

Yeah.

And he’s like—

Huh.

Like you said, if you have 20 variables, it’s too many.

Yeah.

Six, 5, whatever it is. Saudi Aramco would put up the handful of things that were most important, like maybe how much oil they drilled that day or how much they shipped, or whatever the case was. It was a giant fucking screen in their headquarters.

Yep.

At the time, I think Ken Griffin was having an issue with risk, and he identified a handful of things that they needed to monitor. He said he drastically reduced their risk by just putting it—I think at the time Citadel was in Chicago—just putting this giant dashboard, like a scoreboard—

Mm-hmm.

—in the office where everybody could see it.

Yeah.

Just this constant reminder. It’s like you can’t run from it.

That’s it. It comes back to this: 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. In some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filings somewhere and say, “We’re a corporation today,” even though we’re just 2 people sitting around a couch and we have a few dollars in a bank account, right?

If these fictions are intended to grow to hundreds, thousands, or 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 and faster than anyone alone could do.

I think part of the role of a leader, frankly, is to assert, “How will we measure ourselves?” If we are seeking to be our best and get better every day, how should we think about that? How can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard?

We spend an incredible amount of time on that. At the end of the day, I don’t know what Ramp will look like exactly in 100 years, but I think, just as it was true 100 years ago, people have always wanted more out of every dollar and hour. I think people will absolutely want it in 100 years, in whatever form that may take. And so I think—

You’re speaking to this Bezos idea where one of the smartest things a company can do is identify the things that don’t change. He identified 3 at the beginning of Amazon. If you can invest heavily in them decade after decade—

That’s it.

—because you know the customer is going to want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery.

That’s it. That’s it. Look, there’s so much that’s changing about the world, and we can talk about what we’re focused on and obsessed with and some of the themes of this decade, but I totally subscribe to that notion: You should be focusing on the timeless if you’re trying to build an enduring brand.

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. I love building this thing.

You know, I was going to ask you that question. I talk to founders, and they want to talk to me. We talk about their company and—

Yeah.

—one of the first things I always ask is, “Is this your last company?”

Yeah.

It’s just the thing I’m super interested in, because all the good things in life come from compounding. I was just at this dinner 2 nights ago and ran into the son of this guy I wound up being able to spend an hour with. He had just sold his company for $50 billion. I think he’s 77 or something like that.

Mm-hmm.

He started that company when he was 22. So that means he’s had 55 years of experience in the same company.

Yeah.

Those conversations are so full. In terms of insight per minute, you’re not going to beat that at all.

Mm-hmm. That’s it. You’ll see things at a deeper level, and it’s fun. You learn. All the scar tissue you have and the mistakes you made, I think, allow you to move with a lot more efficiency and momentum.

I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history: “This time is different.”

Hmm.

Usually it’s not different. I was spending more time with Michael Dell the other day, and I figured, “Okay, you started the company when you were 19. You’re in your 60s. You’ve had to manage and thrive through all these different technological revolutions and everything else.” I said, “Michael, is this time different?” He goes, “Yes. It’s actually different.”

We had a wonderful conversation about it. So I want to go back to AI—

Yep.

—I would imagine, in your opinion—and I’ve spent enough time with you that I think I know the answer to this—but I think it’s going to change the shape of your organization, is it not?

I think this is a super-deep topic. Maybe we’ll just start at the highest level. You’d ask, “Does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we’ve learned about business?”

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. On the other, you see almost this obsession with the labs and a deep love of them.

Look, I think there’s something incredibly revolutionary going on. I think some of the labs are going to be some of the best businesses created of all time. But the potential of AI is so great that it can blind people and make them ask, “Is it worth working on anything else? Should we even build a company if AGI is almost here, around the corner?”

I think history offers some pretty interesting lessons around this. Maybe, to use an example, let’s talk about air conditioning. It’s 95 degrees outside. We’re not sitting here talking about the great robber baron families of the air-conditioning industry, right? We’re not talking about the great family fortunes of the people who created it.

At the same time, air conditioning—I was born in Las Vegas. That city wouldn’t exist if not for the air conditioner. You live in Miami, right? There are entire ecosystems. If you think about it, the value that was created out of those ecosystems far exceeded the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology.

With artificial intelligence, don’t get me wrong: I think this is going to be one of the most revolutionary transformations in our lives. I think it’s on a scale beyond the Industrial Revolution, making goods plentiful, and it’ll make services plentiful.

I think it’s 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 ask is: In a world in which intelligence is very plentiful, accessible, and cheap, what should you build? What kinds of businesses are now possible?

Just as there were cities and things created that were not possible before the air conditioner, something as dull as that, I think there are entire things we can go do when you have intelligence that is accessible.

Come back to us. In some sense, you and I are a form of general intelligence, right? We have our evolved monkey brains, and we’ve seen over the course of thousands of years how a general intelligence likes to do things.

It turns out that general intelligences like to pay for things. They will hire other types of intelligences to go do this. You can think about payments almost as a form of distributed ledger to manage resources and work. There are records around this, and there’s a reallocation of these types of resources.

I think part of why we’re so interested in payments in this kind of world is that, 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 even agents in general making purchases.

I think you’ll need a better substrate and a form factor to track, control, and get more value out of every dollar and hour. A lot of what we’re focused on right now is, “How do you build the scaffolding and the systems for organizations to manage not just the dollars they’re spending on people and things, but the dollars they’re ultimately spending toward resources, toward tokens?”

Talk about what you guys are doing with token spend. This is very interesting.

I want to be clear: This is not just some esoteric science-fiction topic, right? Just observe it. Let’s take Anthropic. 3 years ago, they made their first dollar. While we’re recording this, the rumor is that their run-rate revenue is over $50 billion a year.

If you play out what Anthropic and OpenAI, just the 2 labs, are on track to do in revenue, and call it a year’s time, I think it would be reasonably conservative at this point to say they’re going to pass more than $300 billion a year in revenue, which is about 1% of the entire gross domestic product of the United States, spent on token spend.

This type of spend, unlike other types of software, does not have zero marginal costs. Every job you’re doing has a marginal cost. In a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, “I’m just going to 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 we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and through these tokens. Part of why we’re so focused on this is that our customers are incredible early adopters of it. 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. One of our customers is Uber. Prior to adopting this, they had mentioned that their CTO had said publicly that, within a few months, they had spent the entire budget they had allocated for AI spend in a quarter. No one has a budget. I can tell you, 5 years ago, no company budgeted for this type of spend.

By the way, a lot of this is really high-returning, but not all spend is created equal. Part of what we’re doing on behalf of our customers is helping them understand: What did they spend on? Was this OpEx spend? Was this R&D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that?

I think the really interesting thing that’s happening right now is that most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models. That’s a code word for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible, and maybe you use this for your most difficult types of asks. The really interesting thing going on is that the labs don’t like the notion that these models can be distilled.

As you’ve noticed, it’s not one supermodel. There’s a great model, and then 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 for this task or that. It’s constantly moving. What we’ve observed is that about 6 months after the latest and greatest model comes out, you’ll have an open-weight model that is just as good and maybe costs 1/100th as much to use.

And so it begs the question: You can use this advanced alien intelligence to edit your email, but perhaps you could route these tasks to these lower-cost models. Part of what we and others are focused on is delivering services like token-spend management: observing what was requested, what the output was, and whether there were better ways to route this type of work as it moves outside of just engineering into general finances. That’s a major area.

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There’s agentic spend. One way of thinking about this is that you and I, in some sense, are limited agents of our companies. If I’m on business, I have the limited agency to book a hotel, take an Uber, and go to dinner, but I can’t just buy a $2 million Ferrari because I feel like it. I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board’s sign-off.

Or if I worked with you, we’re lucky enough to have this partnership with Aman. So, this room here, when we’re in New York at the beautiful Aman, I don’t think you would appreciate it if I worked at Ramp and I was booking the Aman Hotel.

Probably not. Unless you close some great deals, in which case we can talk.

But what I’m getting at is that we built a structure for organizations to delegate authority to spend on certain types of things. It’s core to how the product works. Already today, there are organizations that are saying, “You know what? We auto-renew $10 million of software every single year. My process today is I ask somebody in this department or that department to review it and say, ‘Do we still need it?’”

They need to go ask, “Hey, we’re paying for 1,000 licenses. Who’s logging in or not?” I will submit to you that, in a few years—and frankly, already, we’re seeing organizations do this—they’ll be tracking this programmatically. They’ll pull the data and see, “All right, we paid for 1,000 seats. How many people actually logged in?”

Maybe we’re getting charged $100 per seat. Ramp can show them that their price per seat is lower or higher than what the rest of the market is paying. 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. I think that’s going to become software.

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, we’re allowing intelligence to allocate resources for you—not just digitally log and help you close the books, but, over time, 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.

I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner. He talks about how, when he’s trying to negotiate these peace agreements, he doesn’t start with, “Okay, let’s do the smallest thing we could do.” He starts with the most ideal situation and works backward from that. He finds that he actually has more success swinging for the fences than if he said, “Hey, I just want you to stop doing this one little thing.”

Yeah. My question to you is: As Ramp evolves and you take advantage of all the latest technology developments, in your mind, what is the ideal product? It’s not there now, but what is it? Is it literally self-driving money? You’re not buying seats or software; you’re buying work. What is it to you?

I think that’s really well said. I’ll just start with who we serve today. A lot of our customers are business owners and finance organizations. I remember meeting a lot of friends who were studying accounting and finance back in college. I remember the things you’d hear from them, like the dreams they had: “I want to be at the table where it matters. 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. I want to do things that are really meaningful.”

You go study this craft and trade of accounting, finance, or whatever it may be, and then you’re rudely awakened to the reality: “Oh, no, no. You’re not doing that. Your job is to do the expenses. You’re going to take the bills and process them. You’re going to rerun this analysis that we ran last month for a liquidity roll-forward, or a financial projection again for this quarter, and you’re going to spend 80% or 90% of your time on rote, recurring tasks because the machinery is so hard to operate.”

There’s so much data split across all these tools today that it’s very difficult to operate. Part of what we’re doing is, one, collapsing the number of tools that organizations need so it’s easier to monitor, but, two, ultimately, providing better tools that generate and move the payments, have the audit trail, know your policy, and are connected to your full financial data.

Then the system can know: Did this dollar make you money? Was it neutral? Or did you waste money by spending on this? Suddenly, the job starts to change. Instead of most of your time looking backward and very little of it being spent on the interesting stuff, if you’re a business owner or leading the finances of an organization, you can actually spend most of your time on who your customer is, what great products you’re developing for them, where the next dollar should go, and how to allocate resources going forward.

For me, where this turns into something interesting is your point: Yes, it is self-driving. This rote, low-value work is done for you. You can turn on Ramp and all of these things. 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 about keeping the books, paying vendors at the lowest cost, or optimizing your working capital. You can hire Ramp to do that for you and with you, and that’s what we’re working toward.

I share a lot of common beliefs with folks like Tobi, 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 missions, dreams, and purposes, rather than getting clogged with all the tedious work that tends to drag most people down and, I think, defines most of corporate life today.

So I think a lot of what we've talked about so far ties to this fact, which is surprising, and I do not know if you or Karim have talked about this publicly, but the competitors you actually look at for Ramp are not the typical people that others on the outside sometimes group you together or compare and contrast you with. Your answer to that is the labs.

Yeah.

Can you explain why?

Yeah. So if you get down to it, there's this question of, “What does Ramp sell?” I think early on we were bunched in with a lot of financial service providers, and I understand that comparison on the face of it. We move funds. We're quite good at it, and people are often coming from legacy tools.

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, right? They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, right—a larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan, right? They are selling you a higher interest on your accounts.

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 while keeping 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 that 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 every payment to close your books. Really, what we're trying to 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 serving and servicing for you. I think that labs are, in some sense, the most comparable providers 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. One, I think it's incredibly exciting. I actually get very energized having great competitors and having great organizations to compete with.

I think iron sharpens iron, and I think it forces people to ask deeper questions, to get off their ass and not be lazy, and to go build something great every single day and week. So I think I'm having some of the most fun I've ever had in my life.

We've had 5 quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while doubling the business and doing it on a multibillion-dollar scale, and so that part of it has been incredibly energizing. On the other side of it, you need to think really carefully about these organizations.

I think humanity is on the exponential. Just a few years ago, we were all shocked when AI could generate a paragraph that sort of made sense and might have had some typos or things that were weird, but it seemed sort of human. Just a few years later, people quibble when you get a 100-page dossier and some footnote is off or hallucinated.

I do not think there's any sign this stuff is slowing down. If you really internalize the capabilities of some of these organizations, I think it calls into question: 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?

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 organizations, maybe you can determine that 2 months ago you wasted funds. With Ramp, we're building the circulation and connective tissue so you can stop dollars from leaving before they ever go out.

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 that we've ever seen.

I think you put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This was awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

Thanks a lot, David.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave 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.