Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
At the end of the day, we serve the companies that are our customers and I'm sure they have a lot of, they feel a lot of drag and they might feel things are moving slower than they would like to and we want to play a big part in accelerating that. [00:00:00] S0: I want to learn more about how you bake this into the culture. It seems this is maybe the central tenet 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. And so it seems there's this bite at the edge of the spear at all parts of Ramp and obviously you're hammering this into people. How do you do that? Describe the process of keeping the culture focused on that tenet.
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: What I like about this is from the very start at Ramp, we tried to create a culture where people have mutual accountability to each other as opposed to this top-down culture where you have accountability to your manager and people want to do well because their peers, their colleagues and other teams depend on them. So that creates a culture where sales cares a lot about product and product cares a lot about sales, and marketing cares about finance and vice versa. That's probably where this comes from. We all need to be selling our products. We all need to be making the customer experience better. We all need to be advising our product builders on what we're hearing from customers so that we can take their feedback into consideration. I just think it works. If I go back to the early days of Ramp, the way I look at it is my most important filter for the interviews I used to do early and still do to this day is: if this person was starting a company and I was looking to join a company, would I join them? Or would I start a company with that person if circumstances were different? That is the only bar. If I had to summarize, my interview would just be that. And that comes from the ability to persevere in the face of challenge and continuously solve hard problems. Because at the end of the day, a company is just a collection of people solving problems together one after the next, and they keep getting more difficult and bigger. And the question is, how much can you endure for how long? And the best way to do that very well is to be on that journey with people who are very aligned, aligned on the values, the mission, and this is 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 these problems together for a very, very, very long time.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: You and I start talking and we very quickly get in the weeds. And sometimes I forget that people don't know every little inside nook and cranny of Ramp. Maybe just describe for people how you think about the business today, what it is, what it does, who it's for. I don't want to presume everyone out there knows the answers to those questions. So maybe just give us a little bit of extra context on what your model of the business is today as one of its leaders. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, of course. So at Ramp, we're building a finance automation platform. It's for finance teams of companies of all sizes, from startups to large hundred thousand plus employee companies, that helps those finance teams run everything from expenses, procurement workflows, accounts payable workflows, accounting, automation, reporting as it relates to the way that they are spending money in their company. And a lot of our focus is in building systems and product that automate a lot of the busy work away. And we've tried to essentially stitch together a lot of the workflows that today are very disparate, can live on 10 or 20 different systems and as a result in incredible inefficiencies for most businesses that are now closing their books in weeks and months instead of essentially having a live view of what's going on in their business.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, of course. So at Ramp, we're building a finance automation platform. It's for finance teams of companies of all sizes, from startups to large hundred thousand plus employee companies, that helps those finance teams run everything from expenses, procurement workflows, accounts payable workflows, accounting, automation, reporting as it relates to the way that they are spending money in their company. And a lot of our focus is in building systems and product that automate a lot of the busy work away. And we've tried to essentially stitch together a lot of the workflows that today are very disparate, can live on 10 or 20 different systems and as a result in incredible inefficiencies for most businesses that are now closing their books in weeks and months instead of essentially having a live view of what's going on in their business. [00:00:00] S0: So if I were to think about a developer and the way they orient towards AWS or something, got this massive menu of stuff that makes it possible for me to build a serverless application and not have to worry about any of the underlying stuff. Is it a clean enough analogy that effectively you're doing that for the finance part of a business? [00:00:00] S1: Over time, I mean, I would say that part of the intent is to make it a lot easier to build and run companies without having to be finance operations experts. You can worry about your company, your mission, whether it's a restaurant or a soccer team or really whatever it is without having to be a finance expert. It can run on autopilot.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Over time, I mean, I would say that part of the intent is to make it a lot easier to build and run companies without having to be finance operations experts. You can worry about your company, your mission, whether it's a restaurant or a soccer team or really whatever it is without having to be a finance expert. It can run on autopilot. [00:00:00] S0: What's the scope of this? How much money do businesses spend a year or something? [00:00:00] S1: Oh my God, so much. It is on the order of a hundred plus billion dollars per year. If anything, I think there's something interesting happening today where I'd argue that probably most primary thing that businesses spend on is payroll for a lot of businesses. But as the world is shifting towards using more and more AI and more and more agents that are built by other companies, it's very likely that more of that payroll spend will essentially become software spend I think it's only growing. [00:00:00] S0: To rewind the clock a little bit. If we were writing the book Karim's Entrepreneurial Journey or something, what do you think would be the prologue? What would be the opening scene of that story?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: To rewind the clock a little bit. If we were writing the book Karim's Entrepreneurial Journey or something, what do you think would be the prologue? What would be the opening scene of that story? [00:00:00] S1: It would certainly have to start in Lebanon, in Beirut, which is where I grew up. And I grew up in a very interesting period of Lebanon's history because I was 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 always been periods of peace followed by some form of conflict and war. And I was born in 89, 90 and I spent the first 16, 17 years of my life there. And it was a relatively calm period. Always spurts of conflict, but nothing really major. But you could tell growing up there that a lot of the previous generation was scarred from the war and 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 there in the air. And a sense from my parents of hey, you're going to have to do the best you can so that you maximize your chances of getting out of here and getting into the best school that you can so that you can get a visa and build a better life for yourself abroad is very important. 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 external risk very well, I would say. It doesn't really faze me.