Eric Glyman, Co-founder of Ramp

23:27And 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. And 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 we've asked him is like, well, how often do you talk to Buffett these days? And he's like, we got, we talked so much. We got to the point where he, we didn't have to call each other anymore.

23:53And 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 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 more pure pursuits of the mission because you understand 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 with you.

24:25And 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 think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue. And then last, look, 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 like 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.

25:13Why 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. 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. iron. You build better products faster.

25:49And so, you know, my whole job, like I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp, not even close, sadly, at this point, my job is to 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 or run fast and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job is to unblock these other people. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool.

26:23I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

27:01The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40 ,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Ramp's six years old. How many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years?

27:36It's just over seven years. or 2 ,620 days in case you were curious. 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 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. But I think that just speaks to you. It's like, well, if we want to have excellent standards, I'm going to quote Toby for the third fucking time in this podcast.

28:09But he even goes, I hate these goddamn Norman doors. And I had to, he has thick accents. What is that? I didn't know what that was. And it's a door where you can't tell if you push or pull it. So he's like, I can't have shitty design things. So you got 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 like we have to adhere to. And I love this idea of like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. 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 conversation.

28:41Have you ever used a Breville toaster? No. 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 and 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 a PhD to learn how to use these tools. People who will maintain your database, they're horrible to use.

29:14And as a result, you never want to go log in. And you can kind of name what the software is. And 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, you know, a toaster slash microwave and all these kind of things.

29:50And before, you know what? You know what? These toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons and knobs and dials. And 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 Normandors. 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. is 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 and you need to start over and it's like horrible.

30:31And 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 it 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 and 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.

31:00It's crazy. All the data is digital in the first place. 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? Right. And so a lot of what we're trying to do was not be stuck in the form factor of what is the product we're trying to sell, 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.

31:32And so I'm happy it's manifested in terms of people saying like ramp is easy to use intuitive. But I think if you actually respect people's time and care about what they're doing, you have to be asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products. 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.

32:02Me and you were at an event. We were talking at an event together, I don't know, like a month or two ago. You're sitting to my right. I look at you're wearing like ramp merch. And I like grab 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 intent of your company with your customers to make sure that stays true? 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? Right. And what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, I'm sorry if any administrators listening to it, there was like 20 of them.

32:39And like I couldn't remember any of them. Right. And what we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask, what are the thing, the very few things that all of us really agree with? And if we don't all strongly feel this and agree with this, like it's a nice idea. You can go pursue it, but it's like not an actual value. 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?

33:15How 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. It's part of why 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, do the experience get better or worse?

33:56And 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 478. 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 going and trying to do all these transformations and simply say, oh, we spent money at Uber.

34:32Here'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 it 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.

35:06We are tracking those religiously across the company to try to go and get better at it each and every month. And 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. They use the term scoreboard. How is this presented to your team? Is it an actual scoreboard inside of RAMP? Yes. Yeah. I mean, you can get it any minute or second of the day if you go on to our internal dashboards. Or you can query, you know, ask one of our internal agents for RAMP research any question you want. How many dollars and hours did we save a specific customer?

35:40Show me all the ways in Italian. But effectively, it's a data table. But it's inside a dashboard on their computer? Yes. Have you ever thought about putting it on the giant, like making a giant version on the wall? 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.

36:13Yeah, I think putting that data in front, constantly reminding and putting it in front of your employees is super important. 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 actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco. And he's like, you know, 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 most important, like maybe how much oil they drilled that day or how many they shipped or whatever the case was.

36:43and it was a giant fucking 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, between this giant dashboard, like scoreboard in the office where everybody could see it. Just as constant reminders. Like you can't run from it. That's it. And it comes back to like at the end of the day, like people love complexity in new things and new products and the world is changing. There's nothing wrong with that.

37:15Like in some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filing somewhere and you say, we're a corporation today, you know, even though we're just two 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, how will we measure ourselves?

37:51If 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 100 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 100 years in whatever form that may take. And so you're speaking to this Bezos idea where it's like one of the smartest things a company can do is identify the things that don't change.

38:26And he identified three at the beginning of Amazon. And you can invest heavily in them decade after decade because you know the customer is going to want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery. 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 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.

39:00Like, I love building this thing. You know, I'm obsessed with that question. Like, I talked to founders and they want to talk to me. So we've talked about their company. And one of the first things I was asked is, is this your last company? It's just like, that's the thing I'm super interested in. Because then all the good things in life come compounding. And I was just at this dinner two nights ago. And I 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.

39:31He 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. That's it. And you'll see things at a deeper level of depth and, you know, it's fun. You know, you learn, you know, all the scar tissue you have, the mistakes you made, I think allow you to move with a lot more efficiency and movement. 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 with Michael Dell the other day and I figured, okay, you started to come when you're 19, you're in your 60s.

40:09He's had to 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 like, I think it's going to change the shape of your organization. Is it not? I think this is a super deep topic. And maybe we'll just start at, like, the highest level of, like, I think you'd ask, like, does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we learned about business?

40:42And I say this because, like, I'll encounter engineers every month, right? On one side, you have people who are, like, you know, terrified, right? This is doom, and it's going to be kind of the end of business as we know it. But at the other, you see almost this obsession, right, 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 businesses created of all time. But the potential of AI is so great, it can blind people and ask, is it worth working on anything else? Should we even build a company if AGI is almost here around the corner?

41:19And 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 created it. 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.

41:51And 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 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?

42:25Just 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.

42:57And you can think about payments almost 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.

43:32And 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. Talk about what you guys are doing with token spend. This is very interesting. 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 rumor is the run rate revenue is over$50 billion a year.

44:07And 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 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.

44:47I'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 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 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 in a quarter.

45:27No 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 &D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that. And I think the really interesting thing that's happening right now is, look, most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models, right? These are sort of a code word for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible.

46:03And maybe you use this for your most difficult types of ask. And the really interesting thing going on, and as this is going into, you have this, the labs don't like the notion that these labs can be distilled. As you've notice it's not one super model. You know, 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 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, one one hundredth to go and use it.

46:38And 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 tasks to these lower cost models. And so part of what we and others are focused on is delivering services like token spin 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 a gent to expend. One way of thinking about this is like you and I, in some sense, are limited agents of our companies, right?

47:16If 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 I worked with you, we're lucky enough to have this partnership with Amman. So this film here when we're in New York and the beautiful Amman. I don't think you would appreciate it if I worked at Ramp if I was booking the Amman Hotel. Oh, 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.

47:53It 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 this department or that department to go review and say, do we still need it? And they need to go ask. It's like, hey, we're paying for 1 ,000 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. They'll go and pull the data and see, all right, we paid for 1 ,000 seats.

48:24How many people actually logged in? This rate that we're getting, maybe we're getting charged$100 per seat. RAM can show them actually your price per seat is lower or 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.

49:02On the other side, 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? The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from. And today that team includes people and agents, but most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business, like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't.

49:43This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data. So when you ask AI to write an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month. And that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready. And when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch. It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over a billion dollars in valuation grew their businesses on.

50:17And now HubSpot for Startups offers this service at up to a 90 % discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit HubSpot.com forward slash startups to learn more. That is HubSpot.com forward slash startups. I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner, and he talks about when he's doing these, like he, you know, he's negotiating, trying to negotiate these peace agreements. He doesn't start with like, okay, let's like do like the smallest thing, 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 like the fences than if like, hey, I just want you to stop doing this one little thing.

50:54My question to you is like, as Ramp evolves and these new technologies, you take advantage of all the new latest technology developments in your mind then, like what is, it's not there now, but like, what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money? It's like, you're not buying seats, software, it's you're buying work. What is it to you? I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with like who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers are business owners and finance organizations. And I think like, I remember meeting a lot of friends, right, who were studying accounting and finance.

51:32And, 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. 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.

52:00Your 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 road to recurring tasks because the 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.

52:30But 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 full financial data so it can No, this dollar, did it make you 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 an 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 your customer?

53:08What are the great products that we're developing 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. Right. As to like, I don't know how to keep books or pay vendors at the lowest cost or optimize my working capital.

53:44And you can hire a ramp to do that for you and with you. And that's what we're working towards. Like 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, missions 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. 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.

54:31You know, other people on the outside kind of group you together sometimes or compare and contrast you with. Your answer to that is the lapse. Yeah. Can you explain why? 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 I understand that comparison kind of on the face of 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.

55:13They'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, it was a waste of everyone's time to do expense reports.

55:51It 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 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.

56:30And so, 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. 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 on a multibillion-dollar scale. And so that part of it has been incredibly energizing.

56:59At 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, 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 a 100-page dossier, and some footnote is off or hallucinated. And I don't think there's any sign the stuff is slowing down. And if you really internalize of what are the capabilities of some of these organizations, I think it calls in a question of if you assume intelligence will be functionally free in some sense, what is unique?

57:37And 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. You know, 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.

58:13But I think they are some of the most exciting competitors for all types of businesses I think we've ever seen. Thank 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.