00:00:00 · George Bonaci, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: I thought it was insane. I was like, there's no way we're going to do this. If you're winning every bet that you take, then you're probably not thinking big enough. [00:00:05] S1: So what are you learning that the rest of the markets can't see yet? [00:00:10] S0: You can fail 100% of the time with this, and that's completely fine. [00:00:12] S1: What would you say is one bet that REM cannot miss or cannot get wrong in the future? Today on Billions, I'm super pumped to talk with George Bonacci, VP of Growth and DemoGen at Ramp, the finance platform now valued at $44,000,000,000 and used by more than 70,000 companies. Before ramp, he led growth at Gong and helped scale Samsara from under $100,000,000 in ARR to over $650,000,000 ARR through its IPO. George, welcome to Billions. [00:00:45] S0: Thank you for having me. [00:00:46] S1: You've helped several, like, extraordinary company and awesome growth stories. You've also said that most bets should fail because failure is actually how you learn. Is that still true when you're making bets inside a $44,000,000,000 company?
00:00:46 · Guillaume Moubeche, George Bonaci
[00:00:46] S1: You've helped several, like, extraordinary company and awesome growth stories. You've also said that most bets should fail because failure is actually how you learn. Is that still true when you're making bets inside a $44,000,000,000 company? [00:01:01] S0: I would argue that it's more true, and it's probably even harder than when you're a $500,000,000 company or $5,000,000,000 company or or whatever it might be. And I think the reason for that is as you get bigger, so to do do teams and coordination costs increase, there's more people that want to review things, there's more stakeholders to get things done. When you're a smaller company, you can just kinda go do it on your own. So I'd argue it's it's it's more important to be able to do that. And I think the way that you do that is by empowering individuals to move independently. And the right individuals means that there's a dependence on you finding the right people, the people that have that internal motivation and agency and can run through walls and can unblock themselves. So overall, I I I think it's harder, but it's more true the bigger you are that you have to be able to fail. Take big swings. Like, people have to be comfortable with it. You have to be comfortable with it. You have to encourage it. You as a leader actually have to kind of drive home how important failure is and and and celebrate it. If if you're winning every bet that you take, then you're probably not thinking big enough. [00:01:58] S1: Nice. I love it. Do you have any example of bets that you you had and that didn't work out?
00:02:03 · George Bonaci
[00:02:03] S0: So many. And actually, think it's probably a good sign that I don't remember many of the bets that don't work out. I I I remember a lot of the crazy ones that I didn't think would work out and ended up working out great. I think, like, a a very crazy one that actually someone posted about on Twitter the other day was was advertising in fortune cookies. I remember someone on my team found a company that did that, and I thought it was in... Insane. Was like, there's no way we're going to do this, especially to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the minimum order size was like over $100, and I did not think this was going to work. But I saw the conviction. And again, like, have to encourage and foster a culture of people wanting to take risks, think outside the box, do things that probably don't make sense on the surface because that's where the alpha is. So, yeah, we did this fortune cookie test where we dropped fortune cookies in restaurants across a couple specific markets, and then we measured the inbound traffic that we got just to ramp.com. And you can kind of see that when the fortune cookies were going out, traffic went up very, very statistically significantly. And then when the fortune cookies are not going out, the traffic got dropped back down to baseline. And we did a bit of a paired test where we dropped them and then removed them and dropped them and removed them. And, like, the correlation was was was, like, on point. So that's a crazy one that that ended up working. But arguably, like a lot of the stunts, lot of the viral marketing that we do, like, I'm not good at that kind of thing. So my general first take is there's no way this is going to work. But you can kind of judge what you wanna take a bet on based on the conviction of the person pitching it. If you ask a few questions and they start to backpedal or fold, probably don't have a lot of conviction. And if they don't have conviction, why should I? But if they really believe in it, like the answer kinda has to be yes. Otherwise, why are you hiring smart people?
00:03:33 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:03:33] S1: Exactly. Yeah. And typically, like, from your perspective, like, as a VP of growth and, like, really managing, like, all of that, how much budget do you give to people? Because if you think, like, this idea of fortune cookie is actually crazy, and someone tells you, hey, it's gonna cost like, I don't know, $250,000 to just experiment it. Like, how do you balance how much people can spend? And if it doesn't work, like, do you help people accountable or how exactly does that work?
00:04:00 · George Bonaci
[00:04:00] S0: Yes. So a few things. I think the first is at a very, very high level as an organization. You need to carve out a budget with no expectations for return. Otherwise, if everything is always a trade off on what the return is going to be, you're just going to invest in things that already work and you're not going to find new opportunities. So number one is like carving out a budget, no expectations. You can do whatever. You can fail 100% of time with this... A percent of the time with this and that's completely fine. I think that's number one. I think number two is like, okay, for individual projects, how much budget are you going to allocate to it? I think it really depends on what do you need to actually learn something to reach statistical significance, to get enough qualitative conversations where you can kind of understand how things are going. And for some things, that's a lot of money. For other things, that's that's very little money. But a lot of times more money means you're going to get signal faster, which is kind of the the third point, is learning as quickly as possible is is more important than learning something perfectly but slowly. So I'd much rather put a $100,000 to something and know if it's going to work or not in a week, then $20,000 and wait a month or six months or whatever it might be. So I think it's number numb numb... Or like a third point to keep in mind. But in terms of like the accountability, it's almost similarly a portfolio approach. Like, I expect people to fail a lot. If you fail 100% of the time and you haven't learned anything, there's a problem. You gotta figure out why you're wrong a lot. And I think the more senior you are, the higher the expectations are. I think if you were a director, VP, you should probably be right more often than not. That's kind of what we're paying you to do. If you're relatively earlier... Early in career, you're still learning. Ideally, you also have kind of like more of a fresh mind. You have crazier ideas. You have more out of the box things you want to try. You haven't been jaded by by working for a few decades. You get a lot more leeway. Like, I'm not going to blame you for failing 90 plus percent of the time, especially if you're learning something, especially if I can see that you're getting better at your craft and your intuition is sharpening.
00:05:45 · George Bonaci, Guillaume Moubeche
That's always how I think about it. [00:05:47] S1: Yeah. And I think like the bigger the budget, the the bigger the the pressure should be on the person, like, to make it work and therefore, like, give their best. So I think it makes sense whenever you can do it, like, you should aim for it.