Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And in many ways, I couldn't care less whether that runs on ACH rails or the card rails or the stablecoin rails. [00:00:00] S0: You'll be the beneficiary of whatever positive change. [00:00:00] S1: Exactly. It's exciting. [00:00:00] S0: Exciting. Let's say we did this again in five years. We have every five-year tradition. And at that next increment we have the benefit of telling the most exciting possible version of the story that happened between 2025 and 2030. What do you think that looks like for Ramp?
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: This is going to be a pretty funny one, but my hope is that people don't have to log into Ramp at all. Basically is the way to think about it. If you're really obsessed over minimizing the amount of time that things take. And today you're having to log in to Ramp and it's taking five seconds and it'll take four and then eventually it'll take zero. And you have a lot of your finances that are essentially self-driving. One of the analogies I use is what's happening with cars. You've gone from very mechanical cars where you have to do everything and fix everything and you have things like lane assist and park assist and early signs that the car can assist you and do a little bit more. And we're getting very close to the Waymos where you could just sit in the back and press a button and you go from point A to point B. I think something very similar is happening in many areas of business. And the one we're focused on is all the workflows and decisions that happen before money is moved, after money is moved, and how you optimize these decisions over time. There's this endless cycle and loop between you spend on something, something happens in your business, it's good, great, you do more of it, it's bad, maybe you should minimize that. So you end up having the infinite cycle of making just better decisions with your money and not wasting a lot of time in bureaucracy. So I would love Ramp to be as self-driving as possible and for people not to have to log into Ramp at all.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: For that vision to come to reality, is most of it the infusion, I'll call it, of intelligence, AI? Basically building the chain as you've described doing so many times. As an engineer, you're always thinking in terms of what are the increments here and then just attacking each one with intelligence, for lack of a better term. [00:00:00] S1: I think that's right. I would also add that there are indirect benefits of the models getting better that we benefit from ourselves as well. And the accumulation of more artifacts and data about how customers are using our product every day and for what reasons. This allows us to infer a lot of what their intent is from their actions and the way they decide to fill forms and what they approve and not approve. So it's the more our customers are using the product and deriving positive outcomes, the more we can learn. And as those models get better about reasoning over more complex tasks, we benefit from it either. Very exciting place to be in. [00:00:00] S0: Can you tell the story about constraints that led you to become a good manager?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: Can you tell the story about constraints that led you to become a good manager? [00:00:00] S1: Oh, God, yeah. There are some funny ones, but the most on the nose one was one of the early days of Paribus. Eric and I were the only two people working on Paribus. And Eric, while having studied a little bit of computer science, wasn't really a software engineer himself. So 100% of the engineering capability of the company was just me. And then I go on a random skiing trip one day and due to unfortunate circumstances, come back with a broken arm. And I remember Eric looking at me and having that reaction, oh, great, we're fucked. Now what the hell are we going to do? And luckily we had started working with a few junior engineers around that time. And that was the first time that I was forced to try to get better at maybe delegating, managing, explaining concepts, explaining architecture, and focusing less on the direct output that I can have myself and focusing a little bit more about how I can maximize the sum total of the output of the team as a whole. And it was very constraining to do that without an arm. I'm trying to type as much as I can with my left arm, but I need to be as specific as I can with as few words as possible and drawing diagrams and writing down some concepts. So that was a very funny experience where I had to very quickly figure out how to delegate work.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Well, back to our book on the story of Karim's entrepreneurship journey. We're just at a mile marker now. You're only six years into Ramp, which is kind of crazy to imagine how fast you guys have scaled. But if I think back, maybe I'll go all the way back to the start of Paribus and encompass the entirety of company building that you've had so far. So a bit longer. How have your views on company building, leadership, management, most changed across that period of time?
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: I used to go into challenges with the assumption that there was a reward at the end and that the reward would feel great. And that was the intent and goal. And I think the more challenges we've gone through and succeeded at conquering or surpassing, the more I realized that the reward is just a journey, to be honest. So it's made me a lot more intentional about doing the things that will help me enjoy the journey over time and enjoy all the challenges that come along the way, because the reward for solving challenges is just more complicated challenges over time. So you might as well just put yourself in a position where you are enjoying these challenges as much as possible. And for me in particular, I think that has to do with more than anything else the people I'm doing it with still meet a lot of young, very talented designers, engineers, builders in general, and they always have different answers to questions, what are you excited about, what do you want to do? And there's some people who really talk about the complexity of the technical challenge, and some that talk about the mission itself. And there are different ways to answer that question. But the one for me that I just continue to go back to is really about the people that I work with. And I feel very lucky that Ramp has such a multifaceted company in some ways, where we have to not only be really good at the engineering parts of it, but also the design parts of it and marketing and the sales and the risk and capital markets and fundraising. And you get to work as a result with very spiky people in very different areas that are brilliant, that I love learning from consistently. So I want to put together great teams, solve that challenge and win and more. The team that will help us consistently win forever, because I would like to build something that hopefully outlives us.