01:16:58 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:16:58] S0: Talk about accelerating at scale. This morning at breakfast. Jordi and I were reflecting on the fact that we were feeling this way even with our much smaller organization. We were like, wow. Like, it's only been a year, and we feel like we're already losing some of the agility that we had when we were just three people. And we were saying, like, I understand what was this thing you said? You said, I understand why companies write down their principles because it's so easy to lose sight of what is important great. What makes you great, what what you do specifically. And so I would love to know just your [01:17:36] S1: reflection Yeah. Even across this year, like, lot of us, the process of making the show better is us remembering the things that we did great early on and that you kind of end up losing your way in slight ways, and then it's about remembering that and kind of coming back to [01:17:50] S0: it. Yeah. So I'd love I'd love to know both what are the things that make Gramp great, but then also your thought process for not losing that? Because I imagine you agree that that is important to have principles and re and redouble the focus on them.
01:18:06 · Eric Glyman
[01:18:06] S7: I love that you asked about this because I I think it gets to the heart of what we're trying to do inside of the product. Right? If you think about probably your your very first year, every dollar out of the organization was something you thought about. Someone wants to buy a software subscription, you know exactly why someone proposed a consultant. It's a debate over it. Everyone knows who approved what was this this this purchase worth it or not? And, you know, years later, suddenly, businesses just start happening to you. You're not happening to the business. Things are renewing on autopilot. Things you you you thought carefully about or or or just running on its own. And what we're really trying to seek to do in the product is when we say money that that that that that that thinks, you know, it's the idea is that before funds leave your account, we understand the principles that you run your business, and we check, does someone have the permission to spend it? It is memory. So once the thing actually moves, you don't need to ask, like, why did we buy this thing? What was it? Like, there's an audit trail of who approved it. Budgets are updated, and then there's reasoning. And so we can actually start to show businesses. Here's how you can get more of every dollar an hour. And so I think that's what's so different. You take things that used to be systems running to now there's checks in the system. And and I think for us, it it it's it's an interesting moment, right, where as a company, we we launched our first product, simple product card and expense, about five years ago. Today, we're two thousand four hundred and thirty six days old. We still count the days. And the reason is, we want to be thinking about, you know, with every day, are we getting just a little bit more done or a little bit less done, in kind of this practice of, thinking about kind of the passage of time, auditing our calendars, asking, you know, you know, are we getting more work done, with the same or less amount of effort, goes a long way. And then last, I would say specific to to you guys, I think part of why I I we've just felt so proud to work with both of you and call TPP and our partners is I think there's this, like, unbelievable care of craft. I think there's it's not about who's done everything.
01:20:11 · Eric Glyman, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
It's like who can write great copy, who can think of funny ideas, how can we take an idea to you know, we're we're doing it tomorrow. And I I I think that you guys have have really lived. I mean, feel forget a year ago, TBPN. I I don't even think you guys were called TBPN, or was it? You know, you've turned into something great. And so I I I I feel strongly you guys don't have trouble with this, and I I think just emphasis on speed and quality and craft has been what I've seen Yeah. With you guys. [01:20:38] S1: No. Totally. Something I was thinking about, we were reading that Karpathy post earlier around how software one point o was, like, kind of more general automation. Software two point o is your automating tasks that are verifiable. Verifiable tasks. And I just feel like finance is, like, just, like, prime for verifiability. Right? Because it's like, well, was this in in the policy or outside of the policy. Right? So Totally. [01:21:05] S0: Yeah. I'd I'd love to know Or
01:21:05 · John Coogan, Eric Glyman
[01:21:05] S0: Yeah. I'd I'd love to know Or [01:21:07] S7: is your policy incomplete. Right? You know, there's all these practices, and you can actually start to learn based off of the actions. And I think something that's so unique is that every time, you know, months close, there is someone actually going in and saying this transaction is categorized here. This goes there. You can see if you grew your revenue faster, if you grew your cash flow faster, or if you didn't. And so there's this incredible feedback loop that allows, ramp to add more value. And we think that's why the average, customer that adopts ramp spends 5% less. And also, the median Ramp customer grew their revenue by 12% over the past year, which is much faster than the median in The U. S. And I think a lot of it comes from this learning. [01:21:53] S0: So help me understand. You're generating cash, but you're also raising money. You're implementing AI, which can be very expensive. We've heard from Ivan at Notion that he saw a slight hit to his gross margins. It's still fantastic business, but did actually see that show up in the income statement. How is how are you thinking about the adoption of AI as a piece of the tech stack? Is it actually reshaping the financials at this point? Or is it something where, you see it sort of just like another subscription, just like another piece of the tech stack, and it hasn't really changed the way you think about the cost structure of your business?
01:22:41 · Eric Glyman, John Coogan
[01:22:41] S7: It's a really good question to zoom into. And in in my general view, it's been fairly overwhelmingly positive. I mean, I I still think that for us, the the goal is, you know, our goal is not to sell someone like a card or a bill payment software. It's to, it's help your business run more profitably. Right? And, I I think a lot of what we're trying to do is if we can actually pay for software where the output is, there's an hour of your, of your time, that you don't of work you don't have to do, anymore, that's somebody's software, that's really great. Next, I think about and you ask most, founders or or leaders in in technology, like, the biggest constraint on your business? Everyone says, I'm having trouble hiring engineers. Yeah. It it's like, I I wanna hire great salespeople, great engineers. And and if you can adopt software I mean, we look at our sales team. You know, the quota that folks on the sales team have is multiple times of our NexLocest competitor in part because we have a lot of tools we built to make our team, far more productive. Our engineers, are shipping about 50% more, code to the codebase than about four or five months ago, and that's continued. And so our general view is, look. If you can actually make the best even better, that's something we're gladly willing to pay for. And so in in our business, we've actually seen, you know, margins expand as we've, adopted this, in part because we think that our our principles, let's create a lot more value than we capture. [01:24:10] S0: Yeah.
01:24:10 · John Coogan, Eric Glyman, Jordi Hays
[01:24:10] S0: Yeah. [01:24:10] S7: And and we're able to do that because we're we're creating much more value Yeah. Than it did even months ago. [01:24:15] S0: Hopefully, that's like Ramp is agile, new company that people love the product. And so it's just so much easier to say, hey. If you want a new AI powered feature, we have that on day one. You don't need to rip us out and go to something else. You don't need to have some bolt on. You can just get it all here. And so you can effectively, like, monetize whatever cost is coming through the actual token generation on your side pretty quickly. [01:24:43] S1: How how do you how are you thinking about head headcount planning over the next few years? We don't have to zoom out to, like, ten years. I think it gets extremely Yeah. Extremely fuzzy. But I'm curious if you care about, you know, every every once in a while, these sort of like revenue per employee or or sort of like net income per employee, like statistics start floating around. I'm curious if you if you if you think about that at all. And and obviously, professor, you know, running running ramp as, you know, one of the most efficient companies in the world is really good marketing for the products. It's probably the best marketing that you can do. But I'm curious how you think about about those things.