The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:50:01 · Max Freeman
[00:50:01] S0: Oh, we've made so many iterations to optimize our sales process over time. As the models have gotten better, really predates to end of last year, early this year, we've done so much for our sellers to unlock a lot of capacity and I'll give I'll give examples of this. Like sales is is very much a conveyor belt. You're a seller, you have an initial meeting with a business, there's work you have to do prior to that meeting. You have to go perform your independent research. What does that mean? You got to go into LinkedIn, you got to go on their website, you got to go into PitchBook, got you to go into all of these different third party sources and publications. When we came to figure out the time of this labor, it's like anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes on the high end. Maybe if you're exceptional, maybe ten minutes. When you quantify that, Harry, across hundreds and hundreds of sellers, that is a disgusting loss of productivity. And so we've built our own internal revenue operating system called Ramp Revenue that performs a lot of this pre call research. And what's great about it is it actually bridges the talent gap. When I think about it, like what an amazing seller might do is, okay, cool. They just launched a new product. KKR just came in. They're now the new sponsor on the debt. This random person that isn't even in finance or accounting happened to use Ramp at a previous company. An average seller might neglect all of that. And so, like, what this system does is it bridges the talent gap one. So going into a call at your fingertips, you know exactly what you need to say and how to execute. And then two, the time savings. Like at most, that's going to take you ninety seconds to perform your pre call research. And so when you quantify that across all of go to market, there's just significant capacity unlocked that I turn into extra selling days, which allows us to over time increase quotas. Increasing quotas is is more revenue back to the business.
00:51:56 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:51:56] S1: Would you ever open that up to the public? One thing that we're seeing with Deal in particular and Revolut, actually, in some cases with their performance management software is they built these internal tools, and now they're selling them. Would you... And to what extent is secret source secret versus monetizable? Because you've got RAM rooted, don't you? You've got the [00:52:14] S0: open rooted RAM router. So on the RAM revenue piece, like, I won't speak for Eric and Karim, but our our ambitions are well beyond owning the office of the CFO. And so I can certainly see a time when we take these other products to market. I think it comes down to timing and sequencing these appropriately such that, you know, our go to market organization can structurally handle all of this change. [00:52:39] S1: That's a fucker. It's not just like a product decision. Like, you can't just be, oh, yeah. Why don't we do ramp revenues? Like, now ramp revenue actually needs salespeople to sell it, to implement it, to do customer success on it, to market it. And I think this is what people so often get wrong with enterprise, which is you can't just, like, give it a go. It's, like, unique because give it a go. [00:52:58] S0: In consumer, you can. Yeah. You flip the light switch on. Yeah.
00:52:58 · Max Freeman, Harry Stebbings
[00:52:58] S0: In consumer, you can. Yeah. You flip the light switch on. Yeah. [00:53:01] S1: Yeah. No. Honestly, yeah, you can, and it's much easier. Let's see how it goes. But it's so different, and it's so complex. And this is why I think people get it so wrong when they're like, oh, Astra Law is gonna kill Harvey and Legora. It's like, are you serious? You think the training and deployment methods are gonna be the same for OpenAI and for Harvey and Nagora who spent two years [00:53:21] S0: kissing the ass. [00:53:23] S1: Completely agree. Final one, where do you fall down as a sales leader where you feel you need to improve most? [00:53:31] S0: There's a lot [00:53:32] S1: that I I need to improve.
00:53:32 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:53:32] S1: that I I need to improve. [00:53:33] S0: I think my my biggest thing that I'm I'm working on is resisting the instinct to personally jump into every important problem. A lot of what helped me progress at Ramp was being incredibly hands on. You know, if there's an important deal, important customer, I'm all over it. But, you know, that that only works well for a certain period of time. Like as your scope gets bigger and bigger, that instinct can actually become a weakness. And so said another way, if I jump in to every deal and solve it, maybe we win the deal, but I haven't necessarily made my sales organization better. And worse, I can, you know, unintentionally teach people that when something gets sufficiently important, Max is just gonna jump in and take over. That's gonna become a constraint. Like, I need to build more and more barrels inside of the go to market organization. Otherwise, I'm I'm not doing my job effectively as a leader. [00:54:29] S1: And you don't build those barrels because you're busy just in the machine? [00:54:33] S0: I think you have to do both. Like, something I pride myself on as a leader and I force it across all of the other leaders in go to market is you gotta be a dual threat. You gotta be able to operate in the clouds. You gotta be able to go toe to toe with me, toe to toe with Eric, toe to toe with Will and Colin. At the same time, you have to be in the trenches with your sellers. Still to this day, I'm making cold calls. I'm sending at least five cold emails every single day. [00:54:59] S1: Are you really?
00:54:59 · Harry Stebbings, Max Freeman
[00:54:59] S1: Are you really? [00:55:00] S0: Yes. I have to. And the the moment that we as leaders get further and further away from the customer and what it is that our sellers are doing, I think we die. I don't think we're being helpful or adding value to our sales team. There's nothing less inspiring as a seller than taking instruction from someone that you don't believe can do the job better than you. [00:55:22] S1: Can I ask you, what what do you think Eric Kareem did to imbue a founder like mentality within you? When I talk to you now, it very much feels like speaking to a founder. You know, I was just thinking, my gosh, I would like to poach Max. I I was upfront about alternate investment. I'm like, we got a poach, Max. Come on. And, like, you know, I I know that you'd be like, come on. Go fuck yourself. And so my question just to you is, like, it's amazing, and I'm giving Ram credit here. What do you think Ram and Eric and Kareem did to make, no offense, Max from Namely who wasn't extraordinary Yeah. A founder?
00:56:03 · Max Freeman
[00:56:03] S0: I think a few things. One, a lot of exposure. When I joined Ramp, my boss was effectively Eric. I'm seeing him in sales conversations. I'm seeing him talking to investors. I'm seeing an operating out of his email inbox. Like, it felt like I earned 50 MBAs in a nine month period of time. That was an insane acceleration. And then two, also exposure to investors that have seen and done this before. Like, I'm super grateful that I get to call Dave Schneider a friend and a mentor. I've learned a lot from him. And then two, Colin, my boss, is exceptional. Like, he's taken companies public. He's sold businesses, and so I think just being in the room has allowed me to absorb a lot of this knowledge, and two, it's forced me to figure it the fuck out. Like, I'm not naive to the fact that I have to earn this every day. If I don't perform, I could lose my job at any moment. If I'm not buttoned up in executive conversations with Eric, whether it's external with a customer or internal with a hot board topic, why would I still have this position? And so, like, I I think it's a a combination and a sum of all parts of the founders have given me a lot of exposure. They hold me intensely accountable, and I have, like, a healthy amount of stress and paranoia that if I don't keep delivering and I don't keep growing, the music could stop.