The Anatomy of Ramp's Hyper-Growth | Karim Atiyeh Interview

0:00 I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of well we want to make sure that there are no bugs. It's like you know what's one great way to make sure that you have no bugs? Don't chip anything. Don't write any code. You will have no bugs. And that's the problem with that approach. If you are solving for great outcome and great impact, you want things to be breaking. [Music] All right. Kareem, we're going to start this conversation at the very end, which is today, because you have one of the most unique perspectives on what's going on in the world as this technology paradigm is shifting where you're not an upstart anymore. You're a big established company, but at the same time, you run the company like an upstart, like it's day one, and you're up against massive incumbents. And so the reason I'm interested in this like cocktail is this is going to happen in every industry where there's big stodgy incumbents that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. There's going to be fast talented young companies that challenge them. And so I'm curious for you to detail what it's like to be in that position right now where you're past a billion in revenue.

1:11 You're one of the fastest companies ever to grow to that that size in five six years and you're up against MX and companies like this. What what does that feel like? like what does the competitive battlefield feel like to you today? >> It's very exciting. But even when you are describing us as uh no longer an upstart, it's like I I uh I still haven't internalized this to be honest with you. I I think about like the the the most exciting aspect of being a startup is that you get to grow very uh fast, make decisions quickly and move quickly. So we are trying to maintain that as much as we can and we do this by essentially breaking up all the different problems we're trying to go after and give small teams full autonomy over these problems. So every time I spent I spent some time with a small part of the company, it does it does feel like they have full autonomy over the the problem they're they're going uh after and the way they're building. And I'd say with like what's going on with AI advancements and the different ways that that companies are are starting to build is that every company's trying to figure out how to uh adopt those new technologies and and benefit from them.

2:18 And you have you're still in the phase where you have like these articles coming out every couple weeks that are mixed. Some will say like oh companies are adopting AI but not seeing any benefit. and another week you have an article from someone you think highly of or you trust saying that like their company has adopted AI in uh some part of the organization. It's had like an immense impact on them. So it's still early. It's obvious to me that the uh impacts of adopting the technology are transformative but a lot of companies are still stuck in the very early phases and I would describe the first very early phase as you are using those uh LLMs to do the same work that you were doing before maybe a little bit faster or more efficiently. So if you're a developer for example you are using AI to help you write a little bit more code. So, you're not sure on how to write the next couple of lines of codes.

3:07 Uh, you go to a chat GPT, you go to an LLM and, uh, have it give you advice. You get some code, you copy, you copy it, you paste it. Uh, maybe you go a little bit further and you start using these a agents where you describe your problem in English and you use a a cognition or or a cursor and then you get a lot more code written for you and then you're reviewing it and and that's that's cool. Uh, but I think that the next phase that we're we're entering and the one that I'm I'm I'm seeing in our company is one where you start thinking about these LLMs really as as part of your product and you're pro programming them. So you're no longer writing the same code that you used to write with the help of LLMs. Your code is the LLM now. Your code is the LLM uh plus instructions and an infinite loop. So you're essentially like writing those those those agents like that. That's what it means. And uh we're in the middle of that right now. Do you have a favorite example of that so far that you've actually deployed and is working?

4:02 >> Yeah, of course. I'd say the the most obvious one is um what we we call internally our our like the what we call the policy agent. So most companies have a travel uh and expense uh management policy. Uh it's generally a document. Sometimes it's well written and and clear and sometimes it's not. That's that's that's it's essentially a document that you write to drive the behaviors of uh people in the company and how they they how they manage their their expenses. Right? In the old world, people make transactions before they make the transaction. Sometimes they'll go and check the expense report.

4:35 Sometimes they try to remember it from memory. They'll make a transaction. They'll file an expense report and some manager will try to make sure that some manager or someone on the finance team will try to make sure that the expense that was made by the employee actually abides by the rules of the expense policy. It's very manual. U generally the transactions are missing context. So there's a lot of back and forth between the the people enforcing the policy and the people who made the transaction.

4:59 Takes a lot of time. So we've built our policy agent uh in a way that it has more context about the transaction than most people reviewing those transactions today. So it's integrated with your calendar, it's integrated with your email, it knows your expense policy, etc. And more context about the policy than than than any employee. So it can run 24/7 as transaction comes come come in and uh apply the logic of the expense policy against these transactions and decide whether something is in in policy or not. Uh and do that a lot more efficiently than than any human. So you have a 24/7 live enforcement of uh your policy. And not only that, but as it runs over time, it gets better at advising how to make uh the policy a little bit uh clearer or easier to interpret and your policy becomes better and better over time. You essentially have this living breathing text document that can evolve over time that's guiding an agent that has access to tools like your calendar, email, etc. on how to classify transactions. Um and that same principle applies in so many different parts of the company. Now the good thing about expense policies is most company have them but companies do all sorts of things that uh sometimes are not written down that can be very easily automated by agents. So for example when you receive an invoice uh as a company what do you do? It's like well you do you do a couple things. One you make sure that the invoice is not fraudulent. Maybe you make sure that uh you're being invoiced for a product that you've actually ordered a product that you've actually received. You make sure that the price matches what you had uh negotiated. So there's a lot of steps that actually happen uh before and after any payment that a company makes. And most of the time they're not very well documented.

6:42 And a lot of the work that we're doing right now is uh because we have uh so many interesting customers and they're using the the the product to run their their finances. We we can infer a lot of these policies through their behavior. And a lot of that those policies that we're inferring are driving the next generation of agents that that we're building. I was with an old friend last week who was in town for I think Visa had some sort of big conference in New York last week and all the you know all the various players from your competitors and people in your industry were there and he told me that he had no affiliation with with you or or with me that everyone there was bitching about ramp taking all their customers and I'm curious what you think the most common reasons are for that when you're beating whoever it is what are the most common attribution reasons when you study why a given customer is picking you over somebody else because it seems a little bit like slowly then suddenly thing is happening with ramp. You and I have talked about this offline and I'm curious why it feels that way to you and I think it relates to the speed of product and everything else but but I want to hear it from you.

7:47 >> I mean I I still go back to the early days and and why a lot of people even picked us when we didn't have that much uh credibility or or social proofing. our obsession over wanting to build consumergrade uh user experience for a business product. You think about a lot of the business products that were built in the previous generation, they were essentially built for built for decision makers. So you think about building a I don't know like an an HR tool or anything. It's like well who's a decision maker? It's like well that person on the team. Great. It's like we're going to build it for them. we're going to pitch it to them and we're just going to convince them to switch to us.

8:26 And once they do, we're going to care a lot less about them. And then you end up with these business software that is used at a company that maybe solves the problem of the one decision maker, but makes everyone else at the company very miserable. It's like you solve one person's problem, but you give everyone else of the company just a small paper cut every day. And we wanted to reverse that. There's a lot of business software that was built in that way, right? Like no care for the the user experience. And when we set out to build ramp, we wanted the user experience of uh an Instagram but applied to to business software. Um so I I would say design obsession has helped us a lot and just polishing every single interaction making sure that we only ask questions that are absolutely necessary that we can prefill any form that can be pre-filled so that you have as little work to do as a as as a user of the product. And over time we got even better at this because we get even more data about how people want to use the the product and uh we can skip even more steps and that obsession over design really turned into an obsession over minimizing the amount of time people spend in our app.

9:32 >> I was going to ask what the process is to make that possible. So someone else listening wants to build a consumer grade app in some other business area like what is the actual practice of of doing that over and over and over again? you keep looking at every interaction that you have with a customer, right? It could be an email, it could be a form, and then you ask yourself, it's like, how can I figure out the answer to that question myself without asking the customer or if I'm telling the customer to do X, why can't I do it for them? So, for example, you get uh I'm sure you've gotten like one of those error messages from a product that you've used that will tell you, "Hey, Patrick, you tried to do X, it didn't work. uh you might want to try one like retrying the payment or the transaction, two changing your bank account details or something like this. Well, instead of doing this, we could retry it ourselves for example and if we are asking you to change your banking details or to submit a piece of information instead of just telling you an email like go to our website and submit your information, we could have a form right there uh that allows you to submit your information in the email. So there's always a way to like skip a step and make it a little bit uh faster and we're we're essentially always obsessing uh over that.

10:40 >> I feel like this is rooted in your personal psychology. I was I was talking to our friend David before this and he uses the phrase all the time divinely discontent. Yeah. Uh he told me the story of the day that you announced the $13 billion valuation round which of course exciting moment in the company's history that he was with you and all you were doing was screaming about problems in the product and the team and things not moving fast enough and like zero enjoyment on a day that you would have had a good excuse to be, you know, a little bit more relaxed and instead just like pissed off about something and the product not being good enough. Can you talk about where that comes from for you? Like how long it's been like that?

11:17 There probably two reasons uh for it. One is a lot of the results that you are seeing today uh at at ramp are due to the efforts that we put in and solving the problems 6 months to a year ago. So current quarter was baked in a couple months ago. So I always find it a little bit weird to celebrate lagging indicators. I often think that they they put at risk some of the very important work that we are trying to do today and solving the problems that we have today because people might feel like oh like things are going amazingly well like we don't really have any problems and that's not true there always problems and always ways to make things better faster more efficient. It's it's just a s of like hey we're working on such important things and if we don't realize that they're really important we might uh mess up the next 6 months and the next year. The other one is I feel like if things were good, I wouldn't and we didn't really have problems, I wouldn't know what what what to do with myself.

12:13 Like, what are we doing here? If the the job's actually done, and the good thing is the the job's never done. We could always push it further, do better. There's always more time that could be shaved off of every single user interaction experience. It's like, as I'm talking, it's like I'm I'm visualizing these uh uh charts that I'm I'm I'm sure you've seen. And it's like every time I look at them, I get I get a bit frustrated of uh amounts spent in the US on uh healthcare in total or on education. And you see these charts that have been going up every decade for the past couple decades where we spend more and more and a lot of people would say that the outcomes are not necessarily they're probably better, but they're not not as much as you would expect given the spending. And if you dig in a little bit deeper, it's like where's all that spending going? uh it's it's very obvious that it's just being wasted on administrative BS and and things that don't move the needle, right? Like it's not being spent on more training for doctors or or or the healthcare providers. It's not being spent on uh more training for teachers and and better better educational outcomes. It's being spent on a lot of bureaucracy and and and BS that doesn't move the needle. And I think a lot of that is is uh what we are trying at RAMP very hard uh to reduce. we want to play a big part in in uh accelerating that. I >> I want to learn more about how you bake this into the culture. Like it's it seems like this is maybe the central tenant of the RAMP culture. There's a funny story I heard the other day or another actually it's just literally right over here. Another founder was telling me about the experience of selling his product to RAMP, which is a customer now, and that the last thing that happened was whoever was buying it, it was some random person at RAMP, said, "We'd like to do it, but we won't do it until you've confirmed that you are a Ramp customer for your business."

14:02 >> Yeah. >> So, it seems like there's this like there's this bite at the edge of the spear at all parts of ramp. And obviously, you're like hammering this into people. How do you do that? like describe the process of keeping the culture focused on on that tenant. >> What I like about this is is from the very start at ramp we try to create a culture where people have uh mutual accountability to each other as opposed to top down culture where you have accountability to to your manager and and people want to do well because their their peers their colleagues and other teams depend on them. So that creates creates a culture where sales cares a lot about product and product cares a lot about sales and marketing cares about finance and and and vice versa.

14:45 I'd say like that that's probably where this comes from is like we all need to be selling our products. We all need to be making the customer experience better. We all need to be uh say advising our product builders on what we're hearing from customers so that we can take their feedback into consideration. most important filter for the interviews I I used to do early and and still do to this day is like if this person was starting a company and I was looking to join a company, would I would I join them or would I start a company with that person if circum circumstances were different? And like that that is the the only bar like if I had to summarize my my interview it would just be that and that comes from like the the ability to persevere in the face of challenge and continuously solve hard problems because at the end of the day like a company is just a I don't know a collection of people solving problems together one after the next and they keep getting more difficult and bigger and uh the question is like how much can you endure for for how long and the best way to do that very well is to uh be on that journey with uh people who are very aligned, right? Like aligned on on the values, the mission and like this is that this is the the journey that they're on. There are always going to be more problems. The job is never going to be done. Hopefully, we're enjoying solving those problems together for a very very very long time.

16:04 >> To rewind the clock a little bit, if if we were writing the book uh Kareem's entrepreneurial journey or something, what what do you think would be like the prologue? What would be the opening scene? I mean, it would it would certainly have to to start in in Lebanon, in Beirut, which is where I grew up. And I grew up in a very interesting period of of Lebanon's history because I I was uh born right at the end of the civil war. And if you rewind the clock a lot in Lebanon, you'll see that it's it's always been periods of uh peace followed by some form of conflict and war. And I was like born in in in ' 89, 90. And I spent the first uh 16 17 years of my life um there and it was a relatively calm period.

16:47 Always spurts of conflict but nothing really major but you could tell uh growing up there that a lot of uh um the the previous generation was scarred from the war and and uh everyone was kind of living on edge. So, in other words, I'd say a sense that things are very ephemeral and could disappear very quickly was was there in in the air for my parents of uh um hey, you're going to have to do the best you can so that you maximize your chances of um getting out of here and and uh getting into the best school that you can so that you can get a a visa and build a better life for your yourself abroad is is very important. So there was I was living with that stress maybe hanging over my head in a country that was constantly exposed to all sorts of risks that I've learned to live with um external risk uh very well.

17:43 >> You're 16ish. Um maybe tell the first story of kind of coming here, what you were doing, who you met. >> Uh you know I love your personal story. So what happened when you're around 16, 15, 16? Even before coming, I would I would trap myself in in libraries in in Lebanon and just find like books and magazines that I was interested in. And I I still remember just opening up science magazines in particular and just looking at the latest advancements, discoveries. Every time I'd look at a new discovery that was made, it was scientists at MIT or researchers at MIT.

18:18 And just the name like MIT just kept coming up as a place where um a lot of incredible uh engineering uh discoveries were made and uh as a result I was just like fascinated by by MIT as a school. And then I I look around I guess my my high school and there's one person a couple years ahead of me who had gone to study MIT. So I reached out to them and asked them uh what is it what is it like? what's a good way for me to uh I guess expose myself to um type of work being done at MIT? Do they offer any summer science programs? And that's when I hear about a a summer summer science program that was hosted at MIT called uh the research science institute RSI. So I ended up uh looking into uh that program and applying and coming uh two years or a year and a half before college in 2006 uh to MIT for the research science institute which was uh very transformative transformative experience. It was my first time in in the US by uh by myself for an extended period of time. I had come as a tourist with my parents but that was that was I think I'd come to Disneyland once. I was on my own with another 60 70 or so students all brilliant, incredibly talented and even before coming for uh the program we had to pick what our uh research uh subject or or topic would be and I had picked computer science at the time thinking that uh so great I'm going to learn a lot more about it and it turns out that the expectation was that I would do computer science research and not uh learn about computer science. Uh so that's where I was like uh essentially put under uh uh I guess a lot of stress like great I not only need to do some research but I know also need to teach a lot uh teach myself a lot a lot more in a very very short period of time. Ended up working at this u small uh startup off of uh Kendall subway stop in Boston Kendall tea stop called Virage. And at the time what Vrage was was doing uh was buying lots of video news feeds from all over the country. So they' buy like the news feeds of the local ABC station in Texas, right? Like all all over the US. So they' buy all those TV news feeds, uh convert the the speech to text, right?

20:54 and then convert and then classify the text using uh markoff chains and a lot of techniques that we're using are essentially like the ancestors of uh what um LLMs rely on right it's a lot of the best technology available for doing like natural language processing at the time and my research project involved um training these models that they were using a lot more efficiently than than they were so very interesting at the time the technology was very nent. Uh but it was a very uh uh cool experience.

21:31 I guess the the best part about it all is the friends I I made uh along the way. Some of my best friends to this to this day I've met through RSI. >> Maybe you can zoom forward to Parabus starting Parabus like why you started it and what the original idea was. It's it's this interesting in the ramp story that will be written about one day in some book. It'll be a key chapter I think because of the people that come into your life working together with them in a more formal capacity you know for the first time the business lessons that you're learning. So >> my interest in Parabus is especially like what are the key lessons that you learned in that chapter?

22:04 >> Parabus was uh was an interesting one. So I mean I started Parabus with uh Eric. So same co-founder as as as RAMP obviously and Eric and I at the time were both fresh college graduates. uh in New York, working at our first jobs, both incredibly busy at work. We were buying a lot of our supplies on Amazon online. We were essentially doing a lot of online shopping. And Eric notices after uh a trip that the price that he had paid for uh a flight at a time was very different from the price that someone else paid. and he notices that there's like a discrepancy in in in the way uh items are priced online. And we were very lucky in a sense because that was around the same time that data science was starting to become that function that is very key for uh really everyone but online retailers in in particular were starting to employ uh data teams and uh dynamically pricing their their items to try and maximize the uh um the the revenue. I was in consulting at a time. A little discontent uh as well. I guess that's maybe the recurring theme is like I I kept feeling that we were uh >> they were put Yeah. we were put on these projects really smart, very ambitious people to do a lot of manual work that could be done a lot more efficiently with software. And every time I would try to suggest that we write a little bit of software, I would get uh maybe a nod and yeah, that makes sense. But the incentive just weren't aligned because the consulting firms are pricing for a number of people spending time on projects. So no one really had the incentive to minimize the time spent on projects and just maximize the value. But even then like I found myself writing quite a bit of of of software during my consulting days which is probably why the first version of Parabus that we built was essentially me writing uh like VBA macros uh in Excel to track prices. Uh so the very first version of Parabus was an Excel spreadsheet that had a series a set of SKUs and a job running in the background that would check the price of every single one of those items every day on Amazon. And you could do this with VBA, right? Like the programming language really doesn't matter. Like you can open a a web browser uh get to the right page and pull the price and do it in a loop. And that was the first version of Parabus when we were trying to figure out like is there a business there? Are prices changing quickly enough that there's enough money to be saved for customers that there's a business model there? And clearly there was even in the first month that we were tracking prices, we not only noticed that yes, prices were changing, but the rate at which those changes was happening in that one month in 2014 was increasing over the course of a month.

25:07 And that trend essentially never stopped. So we quickly realized that there was a business there. Prices were changing incredibly quickly. And at the same time, all online retailers had some form of promise uh to their customers that if prices were to drop and to change uh there was a best price guarantee or a price match guarantee. And the reason they do this is because they want to give their customers the confidence to just >> shop with them by default.

25:37 >> Exactly. Click that button. Just do it. If something changes, we'll get it back for you. But they're also banking on the fact that no one really checks the prices of the items they buy after they bought them. With Parabus, we just automated all of it. The idea was like, well, all these retailers have armies of data scientists working for them to >> price discriminate >> to price discriminate, and we're going to build we're going to arm the rebels essentially. We're going to build a technology for consumers, the best technology possible to try and minimize the amount of uh pain in their online shopping experience and maximize the amount of revenue or the amount of money that they can recoup after the fact to by holding retailers accountable uh to their guarantees. And we did that incredibly effectively and it was very popular as as you can imagine like if you're a if you're a customer or a consumer and you see a value prop of click a button save money uh it's free that's it's pretty great value prop. Uh so it grew incredibly quickly. I think we within the span of a year we were like approaching a million uh users.

26:44 um is growing very fast and the experience of building it was uh incredibly challenging because unlike ramp or unlike most tech companies, you are building a product on top of a very unpredictable foundation, right? like we are building products on top of the websites of retailers who one don't want us there, two are changing their pages all the time. Three are are heavily incentivized to make it harder for us over time. When we started building Parabus around that time, Amazon still used to send receipts. You used to get a full itemized receipts receipt with the price of every single item that you bought. You don't anymore. you now get uh you now get a link that says like, "Thanks for shopping at Amazon. If you would like to see your receipt, please click here." And you have to go to amazon.com, log in, press a couple buttons, and eventually you make it to your receipts. So, they made it harder over time uh to get those receipts. I'm pretty sure that we were running like one of the largest scraping operations in the US at the time going through uh at some point like billions of emails per day, tens of millions of receipts per day.

27:55 >> And so what did that teach you? Like what did building that both strengths and weaknesses like things that you would bring with you to ramp but also things that you would leave behind? >> I would say a lot of pragmatism in engineering systems. there's this idea that you're never going to really build the the perfect system. So, you're better off building something quickly that will break in very predictable ways and that you are able to recover from incredibly quickly. So the idea with parabus was uh things you start with the assumption that things will break um and that you are trying to speed up the process of fixing them quickly when they when they break as opposed to building the the the system that will never break. And it is very different from how I'd say most experienced engineers learn how to do engineering at uh larger companies where you are trying to build like a great system that will not break and that will withstand the test of time and and there's there's a beauty to that as well but that's very different from the way we build things at at Parabus.

28:54 So the the name of the game at Parabus is build it very quickly and make sure that it breaks predictably. And a lot of these lessons we certainly brought with us to uh ramp uh with some nuances obviously uh I would say like the first big split that we made at ramp and the way we built product is there are parts of ramp that we should build in a way that they will never break and we got to be very careful the way we built them and experience in building those systems is very valuable and there are other parts of ramp where we need to iterate very quickly assume that that it's going to break very quickly. ly well that's going to break but we need to improve uh incredibly fast and we split the product and engineering teams along that that boundary relatively quickly. So anything that touched money movement risk falls in the category of you need to build it right and make sure it doesn't break and assume that you're not going to have to uh innovate that much frankly on it.

29:54 It's like you just need to build that system really well. And there are a lot of parts of RAMP where we've innovated a ton, right? Like uh pulling receipts from a mailbox and trying to match them as best you can to the right transaction. It's like, well, if it works, it's amazing. If it doesn't work, it's whatever, right? Like no one's going to feel it. No one's going to see it. It's just that a receipt was a match. That's fine. No other company is able to match receipts nearly as good as as as we are. So it's it's kind of okay if you are let's say optimizing the any form or experience on the website like well the button is nonfunctional for a couple minutes or the colors change or the font is not correct. That's fine.

30:35 Someone will complain about it and you'll fix it very quickly. It's okay. And and to this day there are I mean I would say like I don't know there are little parts of RAM that are probably breaking 10 times 10 times a day and we're fixing them like 20 times a day and no one's really noticing. And especially early on I think uh when you have um customers that already perceive you as a small startup and a small company and may have some doubts about your capabilities. Um, I often find it a much better way to build credibility with them and trust if things break and you fix them very quickly as opposed to uh if they just don't care and don't notice anything about the product. So whenever it's like one of my my favorite things to do is just be uh very quick to respond when a customer brings up something that's broken or we notice uh a subpar experience in the product and we see it as a as a personal challenge like how quickly can we notice and how quickly you can we can fix it.

31:36 >> But I take that lesson away. It's sort of in parts of the business when you're building a product that have minimal downside and and high upside you actually want things to be breaking otherwise you're not taking enough risk. Is that the 100%. Um I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of well we want to make sure that there are no bugs. It's like you know what's one great way to make sure that you have no bugs. Uh don't chip anything. Don't write any code you will have no bugs. Uh and that's the problem with that approach. Uh so I think you got to if you are solving for um great outcome and great impact you want things to be breaking. What was the craziest moment in the history of Parabus?

32:18 >> So there was a period of time, I think it was like a couple weeks where we are we were getting angry letters and cease and desist from multiple retailers. were getting these letters from notorious like law firms that we had heard of and we're a team of I don't know like 12 13 uh engineers fresh out of college and like trying to like Google the name of the person sending us a letter or the name of their firm like oh my god this is like a multi,000 people law firm that represents like the largest corporations and my hunch was would be to like send them a a like I'm sorry response and I'm like okay we can't really do this. Like what do we have to do here? And and the way we responded to it is just trying to like explain in very logical terms what we were doing and why it was good for consumers and why they should care. Uh which was really funny. But one of those uh one of those crazy experience was uh we get a letter from Amazon around how we were supposedly compromising the security of the accounts of their users.

33:27 And I thought it was really funny at the time because a lot of the product that we had built was one on AWS and two with the help of a lot of uh AWS architects in order to make sure that it was built as well as possible and as secure as possible for the users. So our response was like great like we'd be happy to get on a call with your team that is helping us build this in the most secure way possible. And we got on a call with uh I think it was like either Andy Jasse or someone very senior on his team at the time when he was uh uh running AWS to just go through like our architecture and how we were building this. It seemed to me on the call that they were actually very excited about what we're building. I was like this is really cool. We we like this. And uh we ended up the call with like this understanding that like AWS was actually kind of really happy with us and that our problem was with Amazon retail. Um but yeah it it ended up getting resolved but uh just as like a really tiny company uh attacked by the legal teams of really massive companies feels really really scary at the time but uh in a way like also validating. Is that helpful to be scared early because then you just get less scared each subsequent time that there's something major breaking?

34:44 >> I I >> Does it just not phase you anymore? >> I guess we Yeah, we just uh I mean if you solve really scary small problems, the reward is scary bigger problems and uh it never stops. >> There's always this line people talk about product market fit as like a stage. >> It seems like a more interesting stage is when is the first time that someone tries to kill you like the like the story you just described. Do do you agree with that? Like if you were analyzing a company, like almost better to invest right after someone's trying to kill them and they survive.

35:14 >> Oh, 100%. People are going to try to if you're doing anything that's correct or right, people are going to try to kill you multiple times. >> What's the key to not being killed? >> Perseverance to never give up to to some extent. It's uh I never see the possibility of us being killed as an option to be honest with you. Like I'm constantly looking for the multiple ways that we can withstand a challenge and and how we survive and I guess you could uh I see the risk when that happens as us endlessly talking about the options and not maybe taking enough action. So, I try to like get into uh gear really uh quickly so that we could just start acting on the ways that we will survive and and and not get killed. Um so there's always like there's when a challenge happens, I guess I tend to uh look through all the ways that we succeed and and maximize the chances that that we do. And I think the companies that don't do that well tend to die because spend a lot of time thinking and talking and not enough time doing as opposed to because they don't see the the options frankly.

36:34 >> What did you learn at the end of Parabus' story? So you sold the business to Capital One. Why did you sell it? Like what what lessons learned in selling a business when you made you know you made good money doing it? >> The Parabus story was very instrumental in us wanting to start ramp to be to be honest because well at the time that we sold Parabis we weren't really looking to sell the business. We were looking for partners that would um help us grow, right? And we thought about it in that way. It's like, well, Parabus, we know Parabus is really great. It drives a lot of value to people who have shopped online uh in very predictable ways. And we're looking for partners who knew or could help us figure out who shopped online recently uh so that we can get in front of them, make a compelling p compelling pitch, and hopefully convert them into a a user. And who better for that than the credit card companies, right? Like they know exactly who made a purchase at Amazon or Walmart or Jet.com at the time recently. And uh we got to meet the team at Capital One and really enjoyed working with them. I mean they they're uh a lot more uh techsavvy than than most of the other bank and that's the reputation they have which is which is great. And we were in partnership conversations with them. Frankly, they were interested in building differentiations for the card product because I mean at the time and frankly to this day, a lot of the consumer card products still fail uh like different uh versions of the same product just marketed differently. So they were interested in different differentiating uh through product and and partnerships and we're interested in figuring out who had uh recently purchased something at at Amazon or Walmart. So we're in partnership conversations with Capital One and around the same time we're getting all a lot of these like legal challenges. It's clear that we needed like more fire power whether in the form of partnerships or in the form of of capital just to withstand the the storm.

38:29 And quickly those partnership conversations with Capital One turn into acquisition conversations. We get really interested because uh our visions were clearly very aligned with the Capital One team. They wanted to give us the the capital, the support, the funding to essentially turn the uh antagonistic relationships with the retailers into more friendly uh relationships and they had a lot of great relationships with those retailers. So that that was very interesting. But the most interesting part about that like acquisition conversations is we got to learn a lot more about the credit card industry, how it worked, where the revenue came from.

39:07 And it was fascinating to see that product that you essentially in the card business they essentially put in the hand of customers. There's no uh contract that anyone needs to sign. It's like the more they use it, the more revenue you make and you can just focus on making the product as good as possible so that they use it as much as possible. And it was kind of refreshing. It was like great. like you just put this card in the hands of a person and the more useful it is to them, the more the more they use it and the more revenue you make. So we started understanding that fascinating business model and it felt very powerful to at Capital One combine that card with the Parabus offering. Uh so it just felt like a great natural fit. After spending about two years at at Capital One and growing the Parabus product which is now called Capital One Shopping and includes some some other features that I think are very valuable. We started thinking like what's what's next for us? Like both Eric and I were clearly not done with our uh entrepreneurial journey. We wanted we wanted a bigger challenge and a lot of the idea for ramp early on was what if we frankly I mean it started with what if we built parabus something like parabus for businesses specifically what if we built technology that help businesses save as much money as possible and that later turned into how can we build technology that helps businesses save as much time and money as possible because businesses as we both know tend to waste a lot more time uh than they do money. Those are generally interchangeable. Um, so we set out to build ramp and just like it was the case for Parabus, really the card early on was a way to know what businesses were spending time and and money on, right? If you know what tools they use and how uh how much money they're spending on them, you get a sense of like how the business functions, what kind of business they are, and you eventually get a sense of where they are wasting both time and and money and how you can help them save as much of it as possible. Um, and this is still true to this day about RAMP. I think I'd say the biggest difference is the scope of our ambition has gotten a lot bigger. uh we're not only helping uh businesses with the money and the the time they spend on let's say like card purchases uh but it's really like all the spend that is happening across their business and all the workflow associated with it starting with procurement right which you could describe as the workflows that dictate how a business makes decisions on what to buy and um how to buy it how to negotiate for it etc all the way to uh accounting for those transactions and and reporting on it. So the scope of our ambition has gone from like the the mode of transaction the card to all the workflows happening before all the workflows happening after and all the time wasted as as that is happening.

42:11 >> So if I go back to like day one of ramp and this notion that you need a way to know what's being spent where and how and why by whom. >> Talk us through like the very first version of the product. Like a dumb investor at the time might have said, "What the hell do we need another credit card for?" Like lots of business credit cards. And like MX had a great brand just to pick one. There were more than just MX. But people loved MX. Like it had a pretty sterling brand. MX for business was like a huge business. Like why do I need another card? Bring us into the room of you're talking about what literally to take as the first step and who to send it to and why and like just like the first couple days are always so interesting. Who raised money from like how you figured that out? just like, you know, the deep detail is so fascinating.

42:54 >> I agree with you, right? Like they they uh they still have a really good brand. Uh but at the time like that that that that's all they had. I mean that still all they have is like they they have a good brand and yeah, I guess you could log in and check your statement but that that's about it. Um and uh funny enough like our pitch in the early days before we had officially launched as we were looking for uh design partners and people to give us feedback on the product was uh it wasn't like this is amazing and going to change your life.

43:25 It was this is not worse than MX and you might as well give it a try. Uh so it's like it's a card it works. It does all the things uh the MX card or any other business card will do. Um and because we have built maybe direct trust with you like you better trust that we will make it better for you over time, right? Uh there's there was an element of like >> well it was it was it was a terrible pitch. Uh but we went and essentially sold this to yeah friends and family like people who trusted us not because of the product we had built but just because of their belief in our capability to improve the product over time. Right. So these were people that we had gone uh through uh Y Combinator with in in in 2015 with with Parabus.

44:14 These were I mean my brother who was also starting his his company a lot of our uh friends who were entrepreneurs in in New York and in the startup ecosystem in New York. Uh those were our early customers. They were partners more than they were customers frankly. They were design partners. And the first version of um I guess the first differentiation we really built and we pulled from from some of the skill set we had uh um acquired at at Parabus was a very robust integration with uh your email, right?

44:46 Like you make card transactions, a lot of the receipts go to your email. Uh how do we tie these two things together as effectively as possible? And we are really really good at uh parsing emails while preserving the the the privacy of uh I guess your your business emails, right? So we were very good at we had built some tech that were would identify the emails that are very likely to be receipts extracting those identifying purchases and tying them to your cart transaction. And that step alone actually saves a lot of time from the workflow of submitting expenses. It's like you look at your statement, it's like, "Oh man, where's the receipt for that thing?" And we got very, very good at mapping receipts in your inbox to the transaction. The next step is we got very, very good at essentially transforming the merchant acceptor identifier into a human readable text, right? You often look at these credit card statements like what is that thing?

45:45 Like it makes no sense. What is like MCDX? It's like, "Oh, that's a a McDonald's identifier." It's like, "Okay, good." Like, "Why don't we just call that thing McDonald's?" So, we built the tech to like clean up the merchant names. We built the tech to map the uh receipts in your inbox to receipts in your statement. And then we just kept improving the product one step at a time and taking it further and further and further. Uh but that was the very first version of ramp. It's just like really good mapping of receipts. I mean h how we thought about investors I mean Eric and I did not really want to raise at the beginning is like well like part of the reason we wanted to start ramp as well was like what is I mean it's one of those things that we could do because we had the right to do because we were second time founders we had some capital set aside and uh building a business like ramp required capital because you need to fund the receivables of your customers like great we have more capital than we did As first- time founders, we have more credibility. We don't really need investors. The first investor that we got in in uh connected with was because uh I mean around that time I was playing Fortnite with uh my my brother and some of his friends and turns out that there were a lot of uh other founders and people in the startup ecosystem that we were playing with and uh and one of them was Dalian Esparro uh at Founders Fund, right? and he was uh I'm pretty sure on uh some sort of garden leave cuz he had left uh Kla with Keith Rub boy to uh and was about to join Founders Fund and that was and I was still at Capital One still thinking about um ramp exactly how it was going to look like and when we were going to leave Capital One to to start the company. And I remember telling Delian, I was like, "Oh, I think I'm going to stop playing Fortnite. I need to start getting serious because uh um Eric and I are are starting another company. And he got very curious and he tells me that he and Keith were about to or had just started I think at at at Founders Fund and they were um essentially uh looking to fund an idea just like this one. And I think he tells me something along the oh I'm going to be in San Francisco next week. Why don't you come and pitch us on on ramp? I then uh call Eric. is like what do you think? Should we do this?

48:10 Like we don't really need the investment and both got really excited particularly because Keith himself was was just a legendary investor and had had a a legendary run and was particularly knowledgeable about that space, right? Like he had helped start Square, was early at PayPal. He was uniquely positioned to understand exactly what we were trying to do and we felt like he would be the perfect investor for our kind of business. We're interested to talk to him more for the advice than the money which is uh I guess the best way to meet investors.

48:42 >> What have you learned about investors since like Ram's been >> I I would call it extremely successful at raising capital but from the right people like your cap table is extremely impressive list of investors. >> What how are you so good at it? >> We don't think of investors very differently than we think uh of our employees, right? Like the difference is you can't buy ramp stock on the open market, right? You can be a private investor in ramp or you can come work at ramp and these are the two ways that you are able to get ramp equity. Employees invest their time and their effort and investors invest their capital or their piece capital. They're not that different. And in the same way that we like to select for employees who we think bring something to the table and can help us differentiate and push the envelope further, that's how we think about our investors as well. like we think of it as a long-term partnership and we think about what they can bring to the table as well and it's very different for every investor. Uh some investors have uh expertise that they can help us with and a lot of them have uh um networks and great portfolio companies that we think can be great partners to us etc. Right? So we've always thought of about it in a way like very similarly that we think about interviewing uh great great employees.

50:01 So you could bring the best person into the company, but if you don't spend time with them to onboard them and figure out what you exactly want them to do and what their skill set is and and empower them to to do the best work that they can, if you bring investors on on board and not nurture that relationship and uh actually get to know them better and understand what they're really good at and how they can help you, you're not going to get a lot out of it. So, we do spend a lot of time obsessing over how to keep our investors aware of the business, how it's going, what challenges we're facing, and how they're best positioned to help us. Uh we spend a lot of time educating them about uh the business and its challenges. And I think it's a lot more powerful to do that over a long period of time so that they see the evolution as opposed to just reach out to your investor once in a while when you need something. It seems like historically there's been more demand for it than supply of it.

50:56 >> Yeah. >> How how uh how much are you using that to drive them helping you between rounds in order to sort of like gain access to future supply of ramp equity? >> I realize that we're very lucky to be in a position where like at almost every round there was a lot more uh demand from from investors than there was supply. But like I I see also I see it as a great opportunity to make sure that a lot of investors that we're excited about can often get maybe a starting uh position in in ramp and and build up the position that they're really excited to get over over time. And we make that ve very obvious, right? like it's it's uh go into the relationship one step at a time and a lot of investors get u some allocation in one round and as we build a relationship and uh they get more excited about the business we get more excited about working with them they have an opportunity to invest in sub subsequent rounds and there's been a dynamic that uh really has started at our seed round and still hasn't uh hasn't ended right most of our investors have I think might be all of them have participated in in in in multiple rounds.

52:03 >> What was the hardest round you ever raced? >> Might have been like 2022, right? Maybe that round was like somewhere towards the end of 22 or or 23 or something like that. Not because it was hard to raise the round. It was more because it was hard for me to make peace with the fact that maybe the the valuations had gone down. But not so much that, but more of a why the hell would be raised because we don't really need the cash and the valuations are done. So what the hell is the point of that? It's hard to say whether part of me thinks that like yeah, I was wrong and part of me was like I guess we we'll never know. But the reason it was so interesting is because when when things like that happen especially in the private markets uh a lot of external observers might have the perception of like well like the last mark that that company had was at a time where valuations were not really anchored in reality. So what really is the mark today like no one really knows. So it ends up creating that like uncertainty for investors for employees for everybody. And there's an element of hey the valuation is what it is. Who cares? Like the act of raising a round only just makes it known. It doesn't change anything about the valuation. It's just like a price discovery mechanism. So that round I think of a lot more as like great like let's just discover what the price really is and where the market really is so we could set a checkpoint and start building from that checkpoint. In retrospect, yeah, it was a hard round to get aligned on like the the the need to raise, but at the end of the day, like we also saw it as like look, at the end of the day, if we get great people on board and great investors on board who are excited about the the journey ahead is like who really cares where the checkpoint is. We've we're never really trying to maximize like what the valuation is at every single run. Like that doesn't really matter. It's about uh what the ultimate uh enterprise value uh that we can create is. And like I think that just comes from the sum total of value we're creating for our customers >> to do that to create that enterprise value. I'm coming back to this like original sort of algorithm that you laid out which is this neat model that if if you do a better job and make a thing easier to use they spend more and you make more money. Exactly.

54:15 >> So like this incredibly highly aligned thing. What were the next couple like turns of that crank? So originally you were really good at receipts and you know something basic to save some time. What's your memory of the earliest like explosive moment of customer adoption and what was going on? What were you building? Like just give us the next couple turns of that algorithm. Once we got in then the algorithm became like let's try to get our best estimate on how much total time is being wasted by customers and get that time down as much as possible.

54:46 So we think a lot about the value that we create for customers in terms of minimizing time waste, right? So you look at time and money wasted, right? like money wasted on transactions that shouldn't have happened, time wasted on reviewing transactions or adding information related to transactions so they can be reviewed and you get the sum total of that time and you start building products that that minimize uh the time spent, right? Can you predict what that transaction was for instead of asking the user for a um a memo? uh can you get price benchmarks about what products cost so that the person doing procurement doesn't have to go spend a lot of time doing research? Can you uh extract the information from an invoice that was received and account for it properly so that you don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out like what accounting category does a transaction fall into? And we kept like essentially like mapping out the total amount of time wasted in all parts of um uh finance team that that we touched. And we look at that as like the total addressable uh market. And as we build products, you get more adoption. You get more customers excited to use more of ramp and the total value that we deliver for them is is higher. There were points early on where you get customers that just don't want to hear the pitch at all. They're like, I'm really only interested in the the card part. I'm really only interested in cash back I'm going to get and uh maybe the API that you offer, right? Like I remember one one early customer that I'm sure you're familiar is that that familiar with that that I sadly cannot mention in the uh just broadly like um aerospace engineering like famous for wanting to build like a lot of their everything in house a lot of their software in house healthy skepticism of external vendors.

56:40 Well, they weren't going to build their their card product, but as a result, their perspective when they wanted to use RAMP was like, we're really only interested in the card, all the other software we want to build ourselves. It's like, great. They were excited that we offered an API because they're like, fantastic. We can plug into the card that you've built and we can map it to our internal ERP and extract all the data we need and we'll build all the software.

57:05 the first six months roll around is like, "Oh, we really like what you built there over the past couple months. We want to try it." And they tried that. It's like, "Oh, we really like what you've built around uh like AP automation. We really want to try it." And before you know it, they're actually trying more and more of the product, driving a lot more value, and they're very excited to roll it out not only to more users in their business, but frankly to more of the finance workflows that they're experiencing. So um that land and expand motion really started to become real. I would say like two and a half or 3 years into the company where it was no longer like this cool looking card with a nice UX that integrated it with your receipts but we actually were building AP automation software, accounting automation software, etc. How do you think about the transition from a business that's like a total payment volume business where you're basically making more money as more is spent on the cards >> to something that looks more like a blended TPV and SAS business? So like I know your SAS revenue is is exploding like >> talk about that transition. Why why go that direction? Why not just try to push it all through TPV? It's a beautiful and very simple business model to be able to just like put the cards in the hands of somebody and the way the more they use it, the more revenue you get and you're just um essentially focused on building great software so that they're incentivized to use it. We actually want businesses to spend less, right? So unlike most other card companies, we're not here to uh put rewards in front of them that will incentivize them to spend more. Our view is build software that helps them spend less and as a result they'll use your card and you get more share of wallet but they're they're saving money.

58:49 >> They're saving money. Like the best ways to help them save money is to help them not make transactions that they should have never made as opposed to giving them points and rewards. And that's a beautiful model. The limits of that model though is that the amount of money that businesses spend on card does not scale does not scale linearly with the complexity of that business. Um so small businesses tend to run everything through card. So it works well for small businesses but like as you mature uh the larger businesses tend to move a lot more of their purchasing and spending through essentially bill payments and procurement systems and not as much through through card. So if you look at the if you like try to visualize what does like card spend look at in a business as a let's say on one dimension you have card spend on the other dimension you have either complexity of the business or number of employees or however you want to chart it starts to like plateau at some point when you really think about like what a real skill is at ramp is like we're really good at let's say reducing the bureaucracy complexity time waste in a system a company and building software to do that and that has a lot of value for really large businesses. So what this means is our mechanism for capturing value which is small percentage of car transaction breaks for large businesses >> because we drive a lot of value for them. We built a lot of great software for them. Uh but we're not able to capture any of that value for really really large businesses because the our our revenue uh mechanism is not scaling.

60:29 So that's when we like started thinking about like okay great like what is the right value capture mechanism when we are really I mean our most of our product and engineering teams are are focused on on driving value for these complex businesses and you're like well like we need to be able to uh charge for software and frankly like if we are charging for software will also guide us better towards the right things to do right like you get a feedback signal from the market that they're willing to pay for certain products because they get value from them from them. Um, and that's when we decided to transition.

61:03 There was a lot of fear when we did, I'd say, internally because you have this like beautiful business model that's working really well and everyone's a little freaked out that it's like, well, are are people going to be willing to pay for it? Is it going to hurt our conversion? Is it going to hurt our growth? And it turns out that not only did it not do that, in in many ways it's accelerated that growth because it's in incentivized our sales team to mention those products, talk about them and it incentivized our our our customers to be a lot more uh demanding and responsive and as a result they helped us essentially guide our roadmap a lot better than if the product was free and no one cared about it. I mean, a lot of our focus on our engineering teams right now is on continuing to build build these products that drive uh value for customers and capture value through like yeah software uh software pricing and and and software revenue.

61:58 And in many ways uh um I mean we're still trying to figure out the right way to monetize and price for some of the agents that we're working working on and and and building that drive more value. Not I mean so how do you how do you I mean I think a lot of companies are really trying to figure out like how how do you price for how do you charge for work like how do you price for work and you have a theory >> you want to charge for complexity of the task that the agent's been able to solve and you're starting to see more and more business models where you're essentially charging for the time that the agent is spending on a task or the number of tokens that they're using which is fine fine. I worry a little bit about that model sometimes incentivizing the the engineering team to not be as efficient as possible with their use of AI, right?

62:52 Like if you're a company charging for how much time the agent is spending on the task, like are you not incentivized to just use lots of CPU cycles and not make it super efficient? So, I worry about that a lot. Um, that's why I don't really love that model. Um, I'm not quite sure exactly how it's going to look like. I'd love to ask you about a few of your kind of general views of company building and the future. One of them that you and I have talked about before is this view that a lot of the best company builders will be very technical in this era.

63:21 >> Yeah. >> Say say more about that. I think we're at a interesting junction right now. And the best I guess analogy that I can give is if you uh I mean the Ford one where like if you had asked people uh before cars what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And we're probably at the juncture right now where you ask customers what they want from your products and they'll say like, "Oh, I want an additional widget here and an additional button there."

63:54 And they don't realize that like the the car to their faster horse is possible. And we as a company should be like obsessing over like what what do customers really want? was like, well, they want to get from point A to point B and what is the best way to get them there? It's like, well, it's to build a car for them. And if you ask the question is like, who even realizes that that car is something that is possible and what it might look like? It's like, well, the people who came up with the technology for what and how an engine functions and what it's capable of doing and what is possible.

64:30 And these tend to be like more technical people in in general, right? So I think the technical folks are more likely to see the possibilities in terms of product uh than than non-technical folks. So as a result I think particularly right now technical folks can be very impactful in other disciplines because they see the possibilities better than um other experts might. And the other side of it is the gap between not having subject matter expertise in a domain like in say in I don't know marketing or healthcare or education and having it is the smallest it's ever been. Right? The only thing stopping you from getting that knowledge is your ability uh to learn and to ask the right questions of an LLM that can help you become an expert a lot quicker than you would otherwise be. I I like to joke now that I'm a I'm a better doctor uh than I've ever been, but I'm not a doctor. I'm a better lawyer than I've ever been, but I'm not a lawyer.

65:36 And in practice, that means that when I'm having conversation with my doctor, I'm a lot more knowledgeable and I know to ask the right questions. When I'm having a conversations with a lawyer, they're a lot more efficient and I'm asking the right questions. And as a result, I think like engineers that know what is possible can help us build um the the the future of uh our our product much better for for our customers even though they are have not done procurement before, they have not done AP before, they have not done accounting before, etc.

66:06 >> You you've extended that even to marketing. Could you maybe tell this story? So rewind time. I don't know, a year and a half or two years ago or something, you and I were talking about this and you decided to go take over marketing as the CTO and you've had this experience since which I find really interesting of what it's like to bring an engineer and an engineering team to a problem without domain expertise in the same way you're just describing. What did you do and like yeah, walk us through that because it feels like that playbook might be usable by others in different parts of their business. The funny thing about that is I think that was a time where all the lagging indicators were going extremely well.

66:44 Like a lot of people were asking me at the time like wait what why what do you think has is broken? I mean things seem to be doing going quite well like there's no need for a change there. And I was looking at the early leading indicators and starting to see see things like well we've made our conversion really good right like uh a lot of in a lot of segments we were converting at more than 50%. Right? That meant that if a customer had a conversation with a salesperson, there was a 50 plus% chance that they will be a customer within 30 to 60 days, which is incredible. And you're like, okay, conversion is getting really good. We've gotten better at monetization, but conversion can't get better than 100%. There's some kind of upward limit.

67:29 There's some kind of upward limit to monetization as well, like some percentage of the value that we're driving. Okay, the upward limit to like how big our TAM is is a lot further because we're still to this day like sub 2% of corporate card alone and it just felt like we were starting to slow down maybe a little bit in our ability to generate leads. And while these two other things in terms of conversion and monetization were going really really well, there's an upward limit to them.

67:58 And if we didn't figure out how to like reacelerate our ability to generate leads, we would be in trouble today, right? So that that was a year a year and a half ago and I started obsessing over that problem and I guess I turned to maybe some some sense of paranoia when everyone else around me feels like things are going great. It's like okay, what is the problem? And for me at the time that was the problem uh how do we how do we make that better? And really I I'd say like around that time there was maybe an attitude of in that in in marketing broadly of like we would try things and if they didn't work we would maybe assume that I was like well those things don't really work for us as opposed to no they have to work we just haven't figured out how to make them work.

68:44 >> What's an example of that? >> So let's say we would try to I don't know run uh an ad on a podcast and it doesn't work. We're like, "Well, podcasting doesn't work for us." And my my attitude would be is like, "No, you picked the wrong person to partner with or you picked the wrong format of an ad." Like, why is the thing broken? It's not that the thing doesn't work. It's you haven't figured out how to make it work. It's like clearly like all these forms of advertising do work, otherwise other good companies wouldn't be doing it. We just need to figure out what works for us and how to make it work for us. That was like the lens that we brought to everything, right? like direct like I don't know direct mail paid advertising uh brand advertising uh all all the different things in marketing product marketing and how we uh launch products so I I went into it with the attitude of all right we're going to fix the experimentation mechanism and the system through which we do work and in many ways like apply the Elon algorithm to it in a lot of parts of marketing uh you need to work with uh you'll need to work with the brand team to say generate an image or an asset whether it's for a product launch or an ad. It's like you want a an image, an asset, some copy and you as part of marketing, you tend to work with the the brand team on those. It's like the way it used to run before is for every single piece of content that you wanted to generate, you had to write a brief. So you would write a brief to explain to the brand team what you're trying to do. That brief would get reviewed by the brand team about once a week. The brand team would decide who to assign to it based on skill set and then you would get some output two weeks later or maybe a week later. So that meant that no matter what you wanted to do in marketing, if you're working with a brand team, it would at the very least take about two weeks, which is kind of crazy. Like what if you need to work on something that uh I don't know should take 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Doesn't matter. it'll take two weeks for it to be in front of somebody and then they'll do the work for 10 minutes. And with that kind of clock speed, uh it's impossible to get anything done.

71:00 And while a lot of people would have gone into marketing with like okay great like the way to fix this is like let's I don't know like come up with a better campaign idea. I went into it with the like, okay, let's just like look at the actual system that generates work and focus on how we can make that system as efficient as possible. I didn't go into it with like, oh, I have better creative ideas than the people on those teams cuz we have amazing people. I just want to put their ideas in front of the world as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

71:30 That's what I'm focused on. Uh, we have great creative people. they'll still come up with the ideas, but when they have an idea and they want to put it in front of someone, I wanted to take I wanted to take 10 minutes, not two weeks. And if we do that, we can take a lot more shots on goal. We could take a lot more risk with the things that we do because we know that if it doesn't work out, we could try something else tomorrow. Um, and that's really the type of attitude that we went uh into it with. And uh I think that that's that's helped us a ton. Actually, I have another example that that that I love, right? You could think about u uh billboard advertising, right? If you want to put a billboard in New York, let's say it cost you $100,000. The funny thing with billboards is uh you don't really get that much economy of scale, right? Like if you want to put another billboard, it cost you $200,000.

72:18 You want to put three billboards at $300,000. But if you want to change a billboard that you've already bought, it only costs you $1,000. So that means that if you're have one billboard in Union Square and you want to change it tomorrow, that cost you another $1,000. You want to change it after tomorrow, that's another $1,000. So you can essentially have a billboard in Union Square that changes seven times in a week and that's $107,000. Or you can have two static billboards for $200,000.

72:45 I would argue that like one billboard changing seven times in a week is a much more powerful way to like drive a message and get a story out than two billboards. uh and it's a lot cheaper. Uh so a lot of the attitude that we brought in is like how can we find like these these hacks and ways to get more out of the systems that exist where like the the creative is not really changing. I'm not trying to influence that but like the system through which we are doing marketing work is a lot more inquisitive and experimentation driven.

73:17 >> I love that one side of the system is getting more uh at bats let's call it. Yeah, >> the other side of the system is like what's where are you getting hits? That feels also very complicated, especially when it's, you know, like we've talked about this just to break the fourth wall like Ramp's our biggest sponsor, Senra's biggest sponsor. We've worked together very closely. >> Typically what we found in podcast is like the values, you just hear the name four million times and then like eventually you want to you need to solve the problem. You're like, "Oh yeah, ramp." Um, that's that feels harder to measure than, you know, a a you know, an ad in Facebook or something where it's incredibly tight the feedback loop.

73:54 You're you're an engineer. Like I I know you like tight feedback loops. How do you balance stuff that's harder to measure and assign value to it? Like you could either figure out what the exact value is or you could think about it comparatively, right? So, the way we've thought about it in in uh working with you, which has been um amazing, versus let's say working with another random podcast is like I I listen to your podcast a lot. I love it. I think a lot of people uh like me listen to your podcast. I think uh a lot of our audience is is people like me who are building businesses and obsessing over businesses and it's like the if I if we decided that we wanted to work with podcasters, right? like who are the best in the world that we can work with that have the right audience for us and and and that's that's the lens right it it's it's more about targeting the right audience than it is let's say a higher level metric like how many clicks am I getting or how many views am I getting it's about getting the right views and that's the way to to to to think about it for us >> so so if if you were to step back and describe once more like holistically the system that you installed how would you describe it like if it had if if there was like a diagram of the system that you came and installed in marketing to do everything you just described, what does the diagram look like?

75:10 >> It's more about I think principles, right? It it's a fast iteration cycles. Uh it's scientific where there's experimentation and and feedback loop. It's it's like let the person who came up with the let's say creative idea be accountable to that idea. It's not done by committee. You don't get to ask 10 people what they think and come up with a watered down idea. You just do it. And if you do it well, you get credit for it. If you if you don't do it well enough times, eventually you will no longer be at the company. Like that needs to be known. Like that that's uh people have more skin in the game uh when they're making those decisions. And making sure that the tools that that team has access to are not getting in the way, but are empowering you. We make a lot more use of AI tooling now in marketing than we used to. And today if you want to uh put together uh an article on RAMP and you are let's say uh um on the on the SEO team or on the content marketing team and you want to generate an image for that article. uh we have a like tool that was built internally that allows you to generate a image that is on brand uh within seconds. So it's quick experimentation, accountability with uh the person coming up with the creative uh and tools that don't get in the way but allow you to get your work very quickly with as little dependency as possible >> through this process. I love the billboard example. So, I'm curious like what the next three are like that is what are the most surprising like things you discovered about different channels or different ways of doing things.

76:48 Anything else come to mind from the year of marketing adventure? >> Yeah. I mean there there are things that have always been true let's say in in paid marketing or what happens in social media is like you get a lot of these uh concepts and and patterns that work incredibly effectively in paid advertising for a very short period of time and stop working. So it's very important to like always be at the forefront of what is happening there and why it's working until it until the all the alpha starts being taken away and it stops working. And I'll give you actually an example from the the Parabus days because I don't want to give away all our secret sauce either because I think that wasn't like a very powerful one. But when Facebook introduced uh video ads in the news feed, I think in 2014 or 15, like that was a new thing at a at a time. When they first introduced it, you used to scroll through your newsfeed and the videos would just like play immediately with the sound. And people were really annoyed and I guess bothered. And Facebook then decided to make those uh video ads not play the sound by default. And when that happened, effectiveness of video ads on Facebook dropped drastically.

77:59 So they got cheaper as a result. But the videos that became really effective were the ones where uh you could tell what was happening essentially without the sound, right? Like so one of our most effective video ads at Parabus, we ran like very early when that was starting to happen, when Facebook had made that change, where Eric and I were dressed in banana costumes holding signs with text on them, right? And it's like it's it's a great silent video because you look at that image, it's like, what are these people doing dressed in banana costumes?

78:30 and like you're holding signs with text on them so you can actually tell what's happening without um having to listen because you can read. And that ad became very effective and it worked very very well for three or four months and then it stopped working. And that is very true in like online advertising. It's moving so quickly and the platforms that you're um doing ads on top of are changing so quickly. So like being at the forefront of like what's happening and like how you can get alpha is is super important. So um we want to hire people who are yeah like obsessed aware of the changes happening with those systems etc. That's also true in like SEO right like Google every once in a while will publish articles about how they're changing the way that they prioritize SEO to say for example uh reward websites that load incredibly fast or reward websites that are very mobile friendly and they do that every couple of months. So being aware of what's what's happening and moving very quickly, super important. Speed super important.

79:27 >> So this is happening everywhere, right? Like there's so much vying for our attention that I'm really curious what you've learned about getting people's attention in the like what things what are the principles of getting attention. Like something that comes to mind is um our friend Scott Woo at Cognition and his team did this amazing launch video when when Cognition first came out and there really weren't many launch videos at the time. And so everyone watched it and had this incredible reach. Now like literally anything that gets $10,000 of funding has a launch video. And so there's 10 million of them and as a result like I personally literally do not watch a single one no matter how big the company is because it's just like this sea of slop of launch videos. And so I I just don't care anymore. So I'm curious what what you've learned about the principles for getting attention in the first place.

80:13 >> It's funny. I was relisting to one of Senra's episodes on on on Dyson recently. Again, I mean, a lot of the same principles we try to apply for this in the way that Dyson ran his business, which is like seeking differentiation for differentiation's sake. It's like we are always looking for ways to be different. uh and the very first way in which we've done that really well and a lot of credit goes to uh Diego and our team who who runs the design team and and how they think about design. Um the very early days we were thinking about like what the right color for RAM should be, >> right? And we're working with um brand partners on it and I remember like this this color wheel that you look at, right? And you see like all these companies that we aspire to be like and where they are on the color wheel and all the finance related apps are like somewhere in the blue blue or green, right? It's like green for money, blue is trust. And there's no one in yellow.

81:14 Like the the only thing in yellow was Snapchat, right? Consumer company Snapchat. And the primary reason why we chose the yellow was because it was different. That's it. You could have argued at the time and certainly some some people did that like oh well if you go yellow you're not going to get anyone's trust and you want to start with things that they associate it was like no like we are going to change that we're going to be different and if we do that really well it's going to pay dividends for a very long time and I think it does like you see you see a very yellow ad or or bus it's like you assume it's ramp right like that is what brand is ultimately when when you think about like what is brand is like well if you're watching a movie and you see a red can in the distance. You might not be able to read Coca-Cola, but you know it's a Coca-Cola can. That's very very powerful. So I think one way to grab attention is to uh seek differentiation and with enough repetition eventually you're like well okay I see the pattern here.

82:13 >> You're a man attracted to extremes and differentiation. Talk about that same concept in recruiting and and recruiting for what you would call spikiness. Yeah, >> I love this framework of hiring for for for slope and for spikiness as opposed to um let's say people who check the box on 10 different things. Um and we've applied that since very very early. I mean, even at Parabis, like I remember one of the the early things at at Parabus was like, well, we're a small company with very limited resources competing for talent with the Facebooks and Googles of the world. It's like we can pay them less money. We have less of a brand. We have probably less in many ways like less less large scale problems to to work on. It's like how do we really differentiate? And there were a couple things like one is like well I'm going to look for very spiky people in areas where I have asymmetric information. We were recent college graduates in some way we knew uh a lot about the people who had gone to the school that we had gone to or the schools that we had experience with. So namely I guess Harvard and MIT for um Eric and I. And not only that we knew about a lot of the hardest classes to that that students were taking. So we could go and look at like let's say a a freshman in college and the classes they're taking and the level of extreme talent in in one area and recognize that very quickly. So it was less about like what is your I don't know your total GPA and your total sum of experiences and start and and other interviews you've done throughout your four years in college. But like I know that like in year one of school if you're taking that class and got a really good grade in that one class it must mean that you are I don't know like extremely talented at math or computer science or whatever it is. So we're looking for these spikes like very rarely. So there's a a couple ways that we're looking for extremes like we're we're we're looking for freshmen where other companies were trying to hire juniors. We're looking for people who had maybe taken and excelled in very uh specific classes.

84:18 And in my case, like having gone to frankly to to RSI and knowing how hard it was to get into RSI and the level of talent at RSI, I was looking for seeking programs like it that gave you an early signal that someone was very spiky even before college in many ways. And people we hired very early on at RAMP was uh I mean was Calvin Calvin Lee who uh we had uh had interned with us at Parabus in January for one month like not a lot of companies offer one-month internships.

84:47 had less than like one year in college, but clearly even then like looked incredibly spiky, right? Like he had left high school early uh to uh prepare for the informatics olympiad. Uh he ended up finishing college in in 2 and 1/2 years. I mean, we met Calvin very early on and built a very strong relationship. So by the by the time that he was graduating, uh we were actually starting RAMP and he was one of our uh very first hires and and to this day like Calvin I think has his hands in so many different things at at RAMP and has gone from being an engineer to being on the sales team for a bit to running our forward deployed engineering organization. And while he's incredibly spiky, turned out to be uh also very versatile uh in in the company and one of my uh favorite people to to to work with. That pattern certainly extended to a lot of the the ways we've done like recruiting early on. Like I I like to when I look at someone's resume, uh I'm not try I don't have like a checklist of 10 things I'm trying to to to check the box on. I'm generally looking for what they're telling me in their resume.

85:59 they're really good at uh brushing up on that topic. If this is a topic that I'm not an expert on and interviewing them specifically on that one topic, like you're telling me you're great at something, I'm going to see how great you actually are. And you better be a lot more knowledgeable about it than me after doing a couple hours of of research. And I get two very strong signals from this. It's like, well, how good of a judge are you on on on how good you are at that actual thing? Uh, okay. you're saying you're great at like I don't know uh poker for example uh are you a great poker player like how good are are you actually are like are you a good judge of yourself or you are are you aware of uh it's like the the spectrum of talent in in that field and and two like like how far have you been able to take that thing I'm a lot more interested in in essentially assembling the Avengers at at the company where everyone has like a clear superpower than a lot of people who just check the box on 10 things. It's like if you're looking the more things you are looking to vet someone on the more likely you are to get uh average people essentially.

87:10 >> Another thing that you you and I have talked a lot about is that speed just pure raw speed which which has been a theme of our conversation today >> is probably the most important thing especially for young companies. Maybe you develop more structural visa- like moes, you know, over time. Um, but to to earn that right, you just need to go ridiculously fast in the early days and iterate really fast in all the ways that you're describing. If you were giving advice to companies on think practical tactical things they can do to make their business go faster, what what are your favorite things?

87:41 >> I mean, you want to shorten the cycle as much as possible between idea and putting the thing in front of a customer. And the way to do that, I mean, there's just so many ways to do that. Like, you could simply just focus on like, great, like, I'm writing code. How long does it take to get to production? And then within that, there's like, well, how fast do your test run? Like, how quickly can you actually deploy, etc. I'll I'll share a story on that, which is quite funny.

88:08 It's like the the first time we hired a a product manager at RAMP was it's like our our head of product today, uh, Jeff. He's like he came into the organization. and he had some experience being a PM at another organization and he looks at the way we are uh prioritizing work and and cutting up chunks of work and he's a little bit appalled that we are not uh sizing the different um levels of effort for the different tasks like a lot of company will do this oh there are 10 things we want to do like this one is like five points and we'll take five hours and this one is one point and we'll take one hour and whatever and it's like freaking out that we have like no sense of or like we're not really measuring how long we think things will take.

88:52 And he's trying to introduce that and I get like freaked out. I like why are you doing this, Jeff? He's like, well, cuz so that we can know how fast we're we're we're actually moving. I was like, wait, like you don't think we're moving fast enough? He's like, no, no, I think we're moving incredibly fast. Like faster than any place I've seen. Uh but like I just want to like measure it. And I believe that there's a little bit of a Shreddinger's principle. uh there where it's like you can get a lot of precision on how long things take or you could do them a lot f you could do them very fast. It's hard to get both cuz if you start to put a lot of importance on like measuring uh in advance how long you think things will take and estimating them very Exactly. Right. It's like you end up uh rewarding and punishing people who make the right estimates. So you incentivize like estimates that are longer than they should take so that they can hit those estimates. So it's like a very simple tactical thing that that you could do but it's hard because you need like a natural ability to understand like how quickly it is to actually develop things and it's hard to do that without expertise in the thing that you're building. So like it it's it's hard for non-engineers to know how long an engineering task can take if you're really good at it. It's hard for designers to know how long a a design task should take etc. So um it's like not following a lot of the processes that other company follow because uh very often process gets in the way. I think process like best practice process are a good way to like move you to average on a on a in a discipline if you feel like you're below average. But often some of the people who are like most extreme on how fast I move or on any dimension that you're trying to measure tend to do things u in a very odd nonstandard way.

90:38 >> What's your commentary on the sort of like base level players and infrastructure in and around this business where you know people have talked about Visa and Mastercard as like you know the best business model of all time or something like this. the introduction of stable coins and you know what Stripe's doing there um things that Visa or Mastercard might be trying to do themselves. What are the interesting like shifting sands to you that might affect how >> that has chang how you build the business? What opportunities might become opportunities that haven't been in a long time? Like the worst idea you could have had for the last 50 years is try to beat Visa at its own game. Like it's network effects too strong. What shifting sands loosen some opportunity in your perspective?

91:21 That's an interesting one. So I think a big misconception is that the reason payments are maybe more expensive than some merchants would like them to be online is because Visa takes such a big cut. Uh that's not true at all. One of the reasons that maybe payments, card payments might be a little bit more expensive for merchants in in in the US is a lot of that expense comes in the form of rewards for consumers and American consumers are very very attached to their uh rewards. Uh it's going to be interesting to see in what areas people are willing to give up any of their rewards um in order to I don't know maybe get um a differentiated experience in in some way and the merchants get like uh cheaper payments.

92:14 Uh, but the the stable coin promise as it stands today for merchants is one where payments are maybe faster and cheaper, but it's still not very clear what it is for consumers or the people paying, right? Because at the end of the day, like if you want to buy something, you just care about the price and how quickly it's going to ship to you and the quality and things like that. Like, do you really care how you're paying or like what is happening behind the scenes? Like, not really. In a way, I think a lot of the shifting sense around like what is the underlying technology through which money is moving, I'd say like that's very irre irrelevant to the people making payments. But what may become interesting is if you believe in a world where the individuals themselves are less involved in making the payments and you have agents doing that on your on on on their behalf, it's okay like help me buy that thing. uh while those those agents might not care about rewards as much as you do or they may help you make uh more optimal decisions. You could see a world where like agents are deciding to optimize the rails and pick different ways ba based on some u different uh maximization function that that that's not related to reward. So in in in other words like if the decision makers are shifting the path that they take to make the payment might might might shift. So, uh, it is interesting.

93:50 I mean, stable coins are are are certainly a very, uh, interesting. I mean, it's kind of crazy that payments cannot like today payments cannot settle on a weekend or outside of business hours in certain cases. Like there's no reason why like payments shouldn't be settling like live 24/7 all the time and and be very cheap. Um, so I think that will change. But to be honest, like from our perspective at at RAMP, like we are in the business of optimizing and speeding up the workflows of our customers and I in many ways like I couldn't care less whether that runs on >> Yeah.

94:30 >> TAC rails or the card rails or the stable coin. >> You'll be the beneficiary of whatever positive change. >> Exactly. It's exciting. >> If I think about we're f let's say we did this again in five years. We have a every 5year tradition and at that next increment we have the benefit of telling the most exciting possible version of the story that happened between now between 2025 and 2030. What do you think that looks like for ramp?

94:52 >> Yeah, I mean it's going to be a a pretty funny one, but like my my hope is that people don't have to uh log into ramp at all basically is the way to think about it. Uh it's like we've if you really obsess over minimizing the the amount of time that things take and today you're having to like log in to ramp and it's taking 5 seconds and then it'll take four and then eventually it'll take zero and you have a lot of your finances that are essentially self-driving. Like one of the analogies I like is a bit of like what what's happening with cars, right?

95:22 like you've gone from very mechanical cars where you have like to to do everything and fix everything and and then you have uh things like I don't know like lane assist and park assist and like early signs that like the car can assist you and do a little bit more and like we're getting very close to you could just like I mean with the whimos like you could just sit in the back and press a button and you go from point A to point B. Uh I think something very similar is happening in many areas of of business and the one we're focused on is all the workflows and decisions that happen um before money is moved after money is moved and how you optimize these decisions over time. Like there's this like endless cycle and loop between like you spend on something, something happens in your business, it's good, great, you you know do more of it, it's bad, well maybe you should minimize that. So you end up having that like infinite cycle of making just better decisions with uh your your your money and not wasting a lot of time in in bureaucracy. So I would love ramp to be as self-driving as possible and for people not to have to log into ramp at all for that vision to come to reality.

96:26 is most of it the infusion I'll call it of intelligence you know AI basically building the the chain as you've described doing so many times like as an engineer uh you're always thinking in terms of like what are the increments here and then just attacking each one with intelligence for lack of a better term I think that's right I would also add that that there are like indirect benefits of the models getting better that we benefit from ourselves as well and the accumulation of just like more artifacts and and data about how customers are are using our our product every day and for what reasons. Uh this allows us to like infer a lot of what their intent is from like their actions and the way they decide to fill forms and what they approve and not approve.

97:15 So it's like the more our customers are are using the the product and deriving positive outcomes, the more we can learn. And as those models get better about reasoning over like more complex tasks like we benefit from it either uh it's a very uh very exciting place to be in. >> Can you tell the story about constraints that led you to become a good manager? >> Oh god. Yeah. There there there were some funny ones but the the most uh on on then nose one was like the one of the early days of of Parabus. Um, Eric and I were I mean really the only two people working on on Parabus and Eric while having studied a little bit of computer science wasn't really a software engineer himself. So 100% of the uh engineering capability of the company was just me and then I I go on a random uh skiing trip one day and and uh uh due to unfortunate circumstances come back with a broken arm. And I remember Eric looking at me and having that reaction like, "Oh, great." Like we're now. Like what what the hell are we going to do? And luckily like we had started working with um a few uh junior engineers around that that time. and and like that was like the first time that I was kind of forced to uh try to get better at at uh maybe delegating, managing, explaining concepts, explaining architecture and focusing a bit less about the direct output, a bit a bit less on the direct output that I can have myself and focusing a little bit more about how I can maximize the sum total of the output of of the team as a whole. Uh, and it was very constraining to do that without uh an arm. It's like I'm I'm trying to type as much as I can with my left arm, but I need to be as like uh specific as I can with as few words as as possible and drawing diagrams and and and writing down some concepts. So, that was a very funny experience where I had to yeah very uh quickly figure out how to delegate. Will back to our uh our book on the the story of Kareem's entrepreneurship journey. You know, we're just at a mile marker now. It's, you know, only you're only 6 years into RAM, which is kind of crazy to imagine how fast you guys have scaled. But if I think back, maybe I'll go all the way back to the start of Parabus and encompass the entirety of company building that you've had so far. So, a bit longer. How have your views on company building, leadership, management most changed across that period of time?

99:46 I used to go into challenges with the assumption assumption that the reward there was a reward at the end and that the reward would feel great and that was the kind of in intent and and goal and I think the more challenges we've gone through and conquering or or surpassing the more I I realized that uh the reward is is just the the journey to be honest. So, it's made me a lot more intentional about uh doing the things that will help me enjoy uh the the the journey over time um and enjoy all the challenges that come along the way because the reward for solving challenges is just more complicated uh challenges over time. So, you might as well just uh put yourself in a position where you are uh enjoying these challenges as much as possible. And for me in particular, I think that has to do with uh more than anything else uh the people I'm doing it with. Still meet a lot of uh young very talented uh designers, engineers, builders in general. And like they always have like different answers to questions like what are you excited about, what you want to do? And like there's some people who really talk about the complexity of the technical challenge and some that talk about the like the the the mission itself. And and there are like different ways to answer that that question, but the one for me that I just continue to go back to is is really about the people that I I I work with. And I feel very lucky that RAMP is like such a multiaceted company in in some ways where uh we have to not only be really good at the engineering parts of it but also the design parts of it and the marketing and the sales and the risk and capital markets and fundraising and and you get to work as a result with uh very spiky people in very different areas that are brilliant that I love uh learning from consistently. I want to put together like great teams, solve that challenge and win and more uh the team that will help us consistently win forever because I I would like to build something that that uh uh hopefully out outlives us.

101:58 >> Last two questions for you. The first is um what are you most proud of at RAMP and what are you most embarrassed about? I mean proud of is uh I think the caliber of people we've we've been able to attract and the sum total of not just RAMP but I think like the the great companies that will come out of of RAMP and the diaspora of of uh amazing people who have spent some time at RAMP and in some cases have decided to go on to to start other companies. I mean, I still tell people who join us that I would love for RAMP to be the last job that they ever have to apply for.

102:37 >> Uh, and that's been that's been very true for a lot of people. And that can mean a lot of things, right? Like that can mean that uh people left and right will just try to approach them because they've been at RAMP. And um I think that's uh it's very easy to want to try to avoid that by hiring people who are purely incredibly loyal and I don't think that's a good idea. It's like I I see it as a sign that we're hiring the right people uh if if if we we keep doing that. So I'm excited to see like the sum total of amazing things that the people who have ever set foot at RAMP or or worked with us will will do over their lifetime. Um incredibly in awe at the talent that we have. I mean, even this past summer, one of our like interns while he was interning at the company like won a gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad. It's just I mean, incredible what what some of uh the people at RAMP have been able to achieve. So, talent, very proud of that.

103:36 >> I think you know my traditional closing question. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? The one that's been like most impactful on on the rest of my life probably happened early on when I was uh going through the research science uh institute at MIT and I was 16 and first time in the US away from my family war breaks out in in Lebanon. the airport's closed and I had become really close with my best friend today uh that I had met at that camp uh Zach uh who you know quite well uh and uh we're together at the research science institute and he just immediately tells me he's like oh like don't worry about it at all like you could just uh I mean the camp is ending in a week you could just uh come with me and and and and be in New York. My family is amazing. I already told them about you. They're very excited to meet you. This is going to be great. And little did I know that like that same day and I I heard that later uh uh a couple years later from Zach's mom. I think he called his he called his mom and was like, "Mom, don't ask any questions. Uh my friend Kareem is going to come uh live in New York with us uh as soon as the camp is done." And I think his his his mom couldn't even be in New York around that time. And Zach had like something else to do. And the day I met I met his mom and like welcomed me with with open arms and everything. Told me that like she would make sure that I had a great experience staying with them. And I I show up at their at their house in the city. And it was I remember the experience being amazed the door. They had like hidden the key for me cuz they couldn't be there. And I open the door and I go into like the kitchen and they're like meals labeled for every day of the week.

105:25 There's pocket money on the side in case I needed for transportation, a list with all the numbers that I could call if I needed any help. I was like, "Wow, like this is amazing." Like, I I don't even know these people and like they're they're already treating me like like family. And uh to this day, like I I think of Zach and his as family as as my second family in in the US. and uh spend a lot of the the holidays together and uh I mean uh really become part of um my my family in many ways. But the fact that they were willing and able to do this very quickly for for for someone who was uh a stranger like in retrospect is like kind of crazy.

106:05 >> Pretty amazing story about a person who may be or probably is the best in investor of his generation. Um pretty wild amazing closing story. Kareem, thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Patrick. It's awesome. [Music]