Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[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. [00:00:00] S0: Okay, so you're 16-ish. Maybe tell the first story of coming here, what you were doing, who you met. I love your personal story. So what happened when you were around 16?
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: Even before coming, I would trap myself in libraries in Lebanon and just find books and magazines that I was interested in. And I still remember just opening up a bunch of science magazines in particular and just looking at the latest advancements, discoveries. And every time I'd look at a new discovery that was made, it was scientists at MIT or researchers at MIT. And just the name MIT just kept coming up as a place where a lot of incredible engineering discoveries were made. As a result, I was just fascinated by MIT as a school. And then I look around, I guess, my high school, and there was one person a couple years ahead of me who had gone to study MIT. So I reached out to them and asked them, what is it like? What's a good way for me to, I guess, expose myself to type of work being done at MIT? Do they offer any summer science programs? And that's when I hear about a summer science program that was hosted at MIT called the Research Science Institute RSI. So I ended up looking into that program and applying and coming a year and a half before college in 2006 to MIT for the Research Science Institute, which was very transformative experience. It was my first time in the US by myself for an extended period of time. I had come as a tourist with my parents, but I think I'd come to Disneyland once. RSI was, there I was on my own with another 60, 70 or so students, all brilliant, incredibly talented. And even before coming for the program, we had to pick what our research subject or topic would be. And I had picked computer science at the time, thinking that 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 learn about computer science. So that's where I was essentially put under, I guess, a lot of stress: great, I not only need to do some research, but I also need to teach myself a lot more in a very, very short period of time. It was a fascinating experience where I ended up working at this small startup off of Kendall subway stop in Boston, the Kendall T stop called Virage. And at the time, what Virage was doing was buying lots of video news feeds from all over the country. So they'd buy the news feeds of the local ABC station in small town in Texas, all over the US.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So they'd buy all those TV news feeds, convert the speech to text, and then classify the text using Markov chains. And a lot of techniques that we're using are essentially the ancestors of what LLMs rely on. Right. It's a lot of the best technology available for doing natural language processing at the time. And my research project involved training these models that they were using a lot more efficiently than they were. So very interesting at the time. The technology was very nascent, but it was a very cool experience. And I guess the best part about it all is the friends I've made along the way. Some of my best friends to this day I've met through RSI. It was a very fun experience. [00:00:00] S0: Maybe you can zoom forward to starting Paribus, why you started it, and what the original idea was 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 for the first time, the business lessons that you're learning. So my interest in Paribus is especially what are the key lessons that you learned in that chapter?