Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Can you talk about—I feel this is rooted in your personal psychology. I was talking to our friend David before this and he uses the phrase all the time, divinely discontent. He told me the story of the day that you announced the $13 billion valuation round, which of course exciting moment in the company's history, that he was with you and all you were doing was screaming about problems in the product and the team and things not moving fast enough and zero enjoyment on a day that you would have had a good excuse to be a little bit more relaxed and instead just pissed off about something in the product not being good enough. Can you talk about where that comes from for you, how long it's been that way?
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: There are probably two reasons for it. One is I forgot the exact quote from Jeff Bezos in one of his letters. I really believe that a lot of the results that you are seeing today at Ramp are due to the efforts that we put in, in solving the problems six months to a year ago. So the current quarter was baked in a couple months ago. So I always find it a little bit weird to celebrate lagging indicators today. And I don't know, I often think that they put at risk some of the very important work that we are trying to do today in solving the problems that we have today. Because people might feel, oh, things are going amazingly well, we don't really have any problems. And that's not true. There are always problems and always ways to make things better, faster, more efficient, et cetera. So just this element of, hey, we're working on such important things and if we don't realize that they're really important, we might mess up the next six months and the next year. So that's part of it. The other one is I feel if things were good and we didn't really have problems, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. What are we doing here? If the job's actually done? And the good thing is the job's never done, we could always push it further, do better. There's always more time that could be shaved off of every single user interaction experience. As I'm talking, I'm visualizing these charts that I'm sure you've seen. Every time I look at them, I get a bit frustrated of amounts spent in the US on healthcare in total or on education. And you see these charts that have been going up every decade for the past couple decades where we spend more and more and more. A lot of people would say that the outcomes are not necessarily, they're probably better, but not as much as you would expect given the spending. If you dig in a little bit deeper and where's all that spending going? It's very obvious that it's just being wasted on administrative BS and things that don't move the needle. It's not being spent on more training for doctors or healthcare providers. It's not being spent on more training for teachers and better educational outcomes. It's being spent on a lot of bureaucracy. And yes, that doesn't move the needle. And I think a lot of that is what we are trying very hard to reduce.
· 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.