 All right, this is the closest I think I'll ever get to being a celebrity, so I look forward to enjoying the next 25 minutes with you, Eric. So, credit cards. When I think of credit cards, I think of something I learned when I was at Google many, many years ago, which was called the toothbrush test. Which was when Larry Page was thinking about making an acquisition, it had to hit two criteria. One, it had to be used once or twice a day, and it had to make a difference in your life. So, credit cards certainly meet that threshold, but until I met you, I thought they were quite boring. So, can you please tell us how you managed to innovate in a category that really hadn't changed for a very long time, and what your initial kind of product insight was, and how you designed something that got into our pockets so quickly? Well, one is great to be here on stage with you, Sarah, and I love the question. I mean, let's take that analogy of a toothbrush. Now, most people, when they think of toothbrush, you spend time, you brush your teeth, your teeth are less healthy, your gums are made cleaner, but imagine if every time you used a toothbrush, it decayed your teeth just a little bit. I hope you would throw that toothbrush away. It doesn't seem like a great product. It makes you less healthy. Now, when you think about most credit cards, the intent that most financial institutions design them with is to get you to spend more on your card. And they throw you a bone in the form of points, rewards, all that. The product literally makes you less healthy. It is designed to have you spend more than you were intending to. Ramp is designed with the opposite intent. We are known as the fastest growing corporate card in bill payment software in the U.S. We went from incorporation to three years later, over $100 million in annualized revenue. And the way we did this was actually saying your credit card should not be designed to get your company to spend more money, but actually it should be designed to help you spend less. So that sense of alignment and that sense of purpose, we came back to a product that would be with you every day, core to your company, but built in your interest. And that's helped us go start and launch and get to a velocity that very few companies have been able to reach. Yeah, one of the things as an investor that's quite exciting is to actually see a new business model. You know, you're very used to seeing marketplaces, SaaS, and it's rare that you see something where the incentives are kind of flipped in the way that you said credit cards, you think they'd want you to spend more and you're saying spend less. How did your customers initially react to that kind of switch? It's a great question. We originally had a very different approach. Our guiding mission is to figure out all the ways that companies are spending more money than they need to and more time than they ought to. And so it started as a process of discovery with our customers. Even from the first 50 that we meant, we would walk into their office and say, you know, look, we are designing products that are intended to help your company be more financially efficient. We've got some ideas around savings, but I would love to understand where are you spending more money than you would like to be. And from there, we started getting lots of different insights. And so on the customer side, I'll give you a small example. We never started ramp to be a company that is, you know, just going and rifling through receipts and automating that process. But as we were starting to ask, where really is your company spending more time? It came up time and time again. I'd be in a back of a cab. I'd pull out my card. I'd make a purchase. The guy would hand me the receipt. I'd open the expense app. It's not there. I have to wait a day. You go a day later. You send a photo of your receipt. You go through and you do this tens to hundreds of times per month. And we said this feels crazy. If you're trying to go and save people time and you start thinking about, there's ten steps. We can actually condense this down to zero. And so for customers of ramp, the experiences you go, maybe use an Uber. You tap your card. You get an emailed receipt. And you're done. Ramp automatically is able to pull that receipt, match it to the proper transaction, categorize it programmatically based off the behavior that you're doing as well as 10,000 plus other companies are doing and tagging their taxi receipts. And that's it. And it could be a very simple experience. But I think that for banks, you know, the question was always how to make more money. They thought very little about the process of what is your time worth. And as the world went from, you know, no phones to flip phones to iPhones, quite literally changing, the credit card was exactly the same and thought very little about the surface area around it. And so I think it really started with trying to figure out, you know, that end-to-end workflow of saving companies time, saving them money was super important. And so that's on the customer side. On our side, I think in some ways it's felt intuitive. But our very first sales hire was untraditional. It was a customer success hire. I was a consumer founder before this, so I didn't know that that was unusual. But the way that we would have conversations is how could we save you time and money? Tell us about it. We recorded every sales call and conversation. And based off of the reasons that both we were winning deals, also when companies said, you know what, it's not for us. We would listen to that, we would market, we would see the spend associated and actually even organized our own company around the process of saving companies money and time. If we could do that, prove it to them, that would unlock more spend, that would unlock more business possibilities and ultimately helped us unlock a very fast pace of growth. Yeah. And talk about fast growth. Would love to talk about how you actually can have had such fast product velocity. I mean, this is something that we're very fortunate to partner with you and we marvel at. And you and I had a long discussion about actually how you design an organization around executing so quickly on product and on the core features that you need and also innovating on things. So how do you design to keep that balance? Totally. So some of this came out of past experience. I started years ago with a consumer-oriented app designed to help consumers save money. We sold that to a credit card issuer in the United States called Capital One and once we got there, we found a place that was once very innovative, became very slow over the process of becoming a bank, becoming a large transportation where the product velocity was about once every four months, if you were really fast, you could launch a new product out. The governance that they applied to how you would regulate interest rate changes, which I would agree, you should be very careful if you're changing an interest rate, were applied to if you want to change a front page to a landing page test. It was just as difficult. And so we found that things were applied in areas that were quite inefficient. And so when we set out to build a ramp, we wanted to try to do two things. First, really respect. You know, we deal with banking partners, we move a large amount of money, and it's really not okay if your credit card doesn't work. If you get the ledger wrong and suddenly your balance is different than what you thought or thought it should be. And so part of our engineering team is structured all around correctness, all around quality tests. Actually, it's about moving slow. It's about low latency and moves at one pace. However, there's another team which is all around speed of iteration. We're trying to figure out areas where companies in their workflows are spending too much time, too much money, and the whole intent is actually measuring how quickly are we shipping new products out to customers and how much of a difference is it making. And so we've tried to adopt both the philosophy of in some parts really in the right applicable place, moving slow, doing it right, and being quite careful. But others were really the end customer need is very fast iteration. I think there's parts of Facebook that actually have it right, move fast and break things, I think is a great thing. And the reality is I don't think you have to pick one or the other. You can apply it properly. And I think, I hope that's of use for other folks who are building fintech companies out there. I think it's possible to be very fast, very innovative, while still respecting the needs of being a well run partner in financial services. Yeah, I think if you can manage that balance in such a regulated space, I think everybody else should accept the challenge. On the customer side, I'm a very happy ramp customer. And I have to say, I have never loved my credit card until now. And I think there's just so few and it's like my love for ramp and notion, these like beautifully designed products that I use every day. And I'm curious, how do you actually get customer feedback? You talked about how you build internally, but how are you constantly integrating customer insights into your process? So, our head of product likes to quote the Henry Fordism, who knows if he really said it, but this idea of building a car, not a faster horse. Our mission is to save companies money and save them time. And so, our intent is all around alignment. But the path that ultimately get there is really one of discovery and trying to figure this problem out together. And so, we know the end goal and we're trying to figure out the process on through. I'll give you a small example. So, we talked about expense management, this field we suddenly found ourselves in as we were creating the credit card. It's critical to every purchase in the United States, at least you require to store receipts for every purchase above $75. It sounds like an incredible amount of work. And it is, we've already matched over the past three and a half years over 10 million receipts. And these were all things that people were doing manually before, an incredible amount of work. Now, as we were getting deeper and starting to discover it, we found that the most common path and what most of our competitors had done was saying, all right, well we're the credit card company, there's an expense management company, we're just going to build an integration into, let's say, concur or expensify or whatever it may be. And when we looked at the customer experience, it required not just for the controller and for the finance director to be building integrations in two systems, but for every employee from one to 10,000 up, starting to have to learn for every transaction, you log in here for the card, you log in there for the expense management report, you log into another system for accounting. And so we actually made, I would say what is time was a bit of an unusual trade-off and we said we are not going to integrate into it. And it reduced our TAM. There were a lot of companies that said, you know, why aren't you using this industry standard for expense management? And the reason for that was we saw the path to actually take something from a multi-step, very complex workflow down to zero steps and really fully automate all the way through. And by taking that hard trade-off, thinking from a first principle's base is looking at the interest of the customer, they are just trying to get their job done, go back to work, save time, run their company more efficiently, and if you could go and change the setup by reducing the number of steps, that would be a far better outcome for customers. And so in some ways, like we certainly try to be opinionated and those trade-offs save us from work, allow us to focus and move fast on core areas that really matter. But ultimately I think it's really simple. It's have your guiding vision. For us, it's save money and save time for customers. Stay true to that. Be open to learnings both in your own views which you hear from customers and build against it and I hope it works out. So far so good as far as we can tell. One thing I mixed that I always like kind of contrarian ideas and approaches. And one thing that you've really done is actually hire previous founders into your company. And a lot of people from Ramp already have gone on to found their own companies. I'm hoping we can coin the Ramp mafia today as others of great fame. And I'm just curious to talk a little bit about kind of your recruiting philosophy and how you've been open to kind of bringing in founders and supporting them in their journeys. So it's a couple sets of things. So at one point in our history actually over 33% of every single person at Ramp was a former founder. Today, you know, we are 400 people and still double digit percentage of folks at Ramp have founded a former company and I think it's incredible. One, I think so many people dream and aspire one day to start their own company to build something that matters. And one of the best ways to do it is to be surrounded by people who've done it at a company that's growing but people who've sort of faced the void and figure out what are we going to do, how are we going to get over this thing. And so not only is it useful functionally in solving these problems but it's an incredible asset in attracting extraordinary people. I'll put it this way, I mean four years ago there was no company, we were not yet formed, we didn't exist. Now there's a selection of people and I think it's easy to forget that with every single recruits they're going through that maybe your LinkedIn, maybe the company page and they're figuring out who else are they going to work with. And if you take talent seriously and you try to find former founders, you try to find really spiky people from the perspective of a job applicant, it makes it much easier, it reduces the activation energy to say I'm going to join this company and I'm going to be there. And so on the one side I think recruiting former founders is an incredible asset to help your company move at higher velocity, attract extraordinary people. And last I think for everyone here, everyone in some way maybe is the hero of their own story and has dream and aspirations for themselves and their families and one day it may make sense for someone who passes through and builds something great at Ramp to go and start their own company and I think a lot of founders are secretly terrified of the conversation where some of their best people say I've got to go, there's a company that's calling me, I want to go and start it and I think there's some part of it that's true but I think that's a part of life, I think it's a part of the deal if you're trying to bring in extraordinary people, being there on that other side one I think is just the right thing as a person to be there for folks who are following their own journeys. But second I think in some ways actually accelerates the ability to recruit people who do want to push, who do want to try and dare and create new products and do things in a different way and so I think it goes hand in hand but you know at the same time I'll put it this way, I mean we are not first, I think in our industry most of my competitors, their founders were top hats, they were alive in the 1800s, it was a very different kind of environment and even in our spend management category we're the youngest in our space and what has allowed us to have our product velocity in a faster rate of execution was recruiting these founders and extraordinary people and so look there's things that come with it but I highly recommend it and you know hopeful for anyone at ramp who over the course of the coming year starts their own company. I hope many, many more people do it, a founder apprenticeship if you will. One of my kind of personal most deeply held beliefs is that there are phenomenal entrepreneurs everywhere in the world and not just in concentrated pockets and that's one of the reasons I recently moved to Europe and opened CO2's office in London so I hope many will come visit in the audience and very happy to be a customer internationally of ramp and so I'm just curious what your international expansion plans look like, I think you can use ramp functionality in 176 countries if that's right but could you talk to us about your presence today and like how that will expand in the future? It's the way that companies are built and the way people work is fundamentally altered I don't think that makes me unique in saying it but we see it so as fast as ramp has grown over the past year international spending has grown 50% faster and so the dynamics of how companies are formed, where people are located is fundamentally altered and so not only do companies need a hybrid way of moving money abroad facilitating expense management in a distributed manner but I actually think that the best talent pools, they are distributed they are in other countries and so it's a huge priority at ramp and so one of the biggest launches that we had this month was we announced ramp international and so all ramp customers are able to first make bill payments in 176 countries in over 80 currencies, just as a click button, you can upload an invoice whether it's one or 100 at once, we programmatically match we're able to decode in multiple languages, match it to your accounting software, you can remit payments abroad you can reimburse employees abroad and so if you got employees in different workforces you can send it to their personal bank accounts and of course our credit cards we're partnered with Visa, you can swipe these cards and use them anywhere that Visa has accepted and today even as a young company we're moving into the hundreds of millions of dollars every year from US companies abroad internationally so it's a huge strategic priority for us for any folks who have hybrid companies presence in the US, you can use ramp today and we hope in the very near future even for international companies you'll be able to use, partner with and experience ramp. I look forward to that and we have a lot of founders, we're on the founder stage after all and I'm curious Eric what are the things that you wish you had known when you were at earlier stages of ramp that you would share with these young entrepreneurs I think a couple of things so the second time around we did something very different than the first company which helped us move a lot faster than we did before and so it was a quirk, we had our first board meeting it was day 133, it was in the summer of 2019 and we were a little bit nervous to go into our first board meeting with our outside board director and we put the day on it, we said it is day 133 cut us some slack, we've only been around for 133 days, we're launching our first customer next week but we'll be there removing quickly and the board found it very funny sort of cute in a way and the next time it was 66 days later and we kept it, it was day 199 and it became one of the most important cultural attributes of ramp where we started to count the days and it was not about it's day 1340 it was more thinking about the passage of time with every 60 days are we getting leverage, are we moving the same speed slower or faster, I think a lot of startups are really about incremental small moves that help you grow and accelerate a little bit faster and if you're able to do, let's say this grow 20% every month, in the very small days it may be going from $1000 in revenue to 1200 but if you keep doing that over the course of years you're going to be one of the fastest growing companies and frankly the largest companies out there and I think as a first time entrepreneur there's a lot of imposter syndrome, there's a lot of feeling of what I do matter in the context of there's so many large logos the scale of this conference, the scale of the world is so big how can I send it apart and I think for me what I wish I had known the first time I was starting my company is you don't need to boil the ocean of progress consistently, each and every 30 days is more than enough and if you just do that and you put yourself in the position of letting time become an asset for your company just continue to compound, you will go a very, very far away next I think in narrowing the focus from years to actually just next week, to actually just this next 30 days it's very clarifying I think as a first time founder it's confusing to say alright well I know I'm a large company, do I go out and fundraise, do I try to go get press, do I go and buy ads do I go and call people up for advice or I do door to door series it's very hard to figure out and constrain the problem and figure out what do you do first but actually by reducing the focus and saying we're going to try to grow 10% this week it's very clarifying, you can say with this tactic we can grow 80% likelihood we'll get there just do that and you start thinking both in the here and now prioritizing what matters saying no to things that don't and over time you're able to manage that progress and so I would just say narrow the focus, count the days a little bit of progress with each and every few weeks you're going to go a very, very long way. Yeah there's a saying in Spanish I'll spare the audience my Spanish but it's like step by step and one goes very far. Well we've talked a lot about kind of how you hire how you ship product quickly, when you look forward to what's new we've talked about international expansion, what are the things that you are most looking forward to and we as users of ramp can look forward to. Oh my god we've we've barely just started we have a lot of work to do so our main focus back to it again is saving companies money and time. One of the themes that we heard time and time again as we talked to customers is you know suddenly I'm 2025 people and my price isn't here enlisted on the website it's contact sales and the more companies that we spent time with we would go and ask what are you paying for not to pick on Salesforce and see their sign in the audience what are you paying and you get one price you ask another company you get another price there is an incredible amount of price discrimination out in the world and it's only growing I believe. Now one of my favorite products as a consumer is a Google product one kind of in your story it's the company of it's Waze. Now I think MapQuest was a great company they would recommend if you want to go from point A to point B you could enter the address get to where you needed to go that was fine but Waze figured out was if you were able to crowdsource that data you could benefit everyone on the network and suddenly you were able to go around the traffic jam find the most efficient route there and when I think about pricing and the way that most companies are actually getting charged it's something like that people kind of know maybe there's traffic somewhere maybe there's someone getting a better rate but my rate is fine I'll call up a friend we'll hit the subscription I'll negotiate with the sales person to get 10% off and I think there's an enormous amount of price discrimination out there one of the goals that Ramp has is to always be acting in the interest of customers now we do this today in the form of we show you redundant spend we'll say to your company you have a thousand employees you're spending on seven sets of project management software maybe you're spending on Asana and Basecamp and Trello maybe you only need one and are only using one we'll show you when there's better publicly advertised rates but actually starting to get back into can you start to show and use crowdsource data to be able to help companies is something I'm very excited about next money movement there's a hundred and twenty trillion dollars of B2B payments around the globe and if you actually examine how most companies are moving money there's an incredible amount of money will work it's a Slack message here it's a Gmail message there if you're FTX you're sending emojis to approve reimbursement requests and it's crazy it's not auditable it's not simple it's not porn it's not workflows and I think one of the mega trends that's happening in financial services is you know if you were a bank you could move money you could store money if you were a software player sorry you could sell software now suddenly you're able to do both and you're able to get into the workflows and actually really fully digitizing orchestrating how companies are making the decisions around what purchase of the make the intelligence to know what things cost the automation to help you close your books faster are all things I believe your financial partner should do and in the future I think they're not just going to be money banks they're going to be time banks there should be people thinking about actually for your company how to be a much more efficient version of yourselves and we think and hope that ramp will be leading the charge I have to say what's surprising listening to you is like from where you sit you've expanded in so many directions right like to help people thinking about their softwares but it's a very broad how did you at the from the start years ago did you know the directions you wanted to expand in the adjacent markets and products or is it an evolutionary process where we do this and actually we have all this data across all these categories we can share across companies how did that evolve it's it's been an evolution I mean for us you know we never set this out to launch a credit card and sell more cards it was to save you time and money and through that process we discovered and started to learn what were the adjacencies that cause companies to spend too much and so I think for us really our view is you're a finance teams you need to do one thing every month which is close your books it's 12 times per year how you move money and how you spend that's just a means to an end it's not the process and so even our process was making that simple workflow simpler taking that broader and as we've gone into new verticals in the eyes of the customers it's actually reduced the number of tools they need to use you no longer need 3, 4, 5 sets of software a card expense management bank account bill payment software just to do one thing which is run your business get back to business close your books you just need one you just need ramp and we have a long way to go to make things simpler but super excited grateful to be partnered you know one just quick plug for code to I know a lot of people know you as a growth stage fund you actually found us when we were 11 days old you've been a critical partner in every round that we've had as a company and we feel super grateful to be partners with you well Eric Kitos that's the one finish word I've learned thank you very much and we can't leave the stage without my complimenting your Mondrian sweater which is very chic thank you all very much for joining us thank you hope this was useful