Ramp
A finance automation platform combining corporate cards, bill pay, procurement, treasury and accounting in one place.
Ramp was close to shipping cards in about 3 months, against a normal 9 to 12, which led Keith Rabois to lead its seed and preempt the Series A. It mostly promotes from within, and an engineering director with about 20 reports ships as much code as he did as an individual contributor. Lesson: judge early teams by operating speed, and grow leaders who own what to build and why.
From Keith Rabois on Ramp's Series A preempt
What was said about Ramp
Ramp's shipping speed convinced Rabois to preempt its Series A. Ramp was close to shipping cards in about 3 months, when 9 to 12 months is the best case for the category. Keith Rabois led the seed around May 2019 and preempted the Series A that September.
Rabois judges early startups by tempo between board meetings: problems found at one meeting should be root-caused, shipped and measured by the next. Roelof Botha said Square's pace was the best since PayPal. Quote: "That speed really does compound."
Ramp mostly grows its leaders from within instead of hiring senior outsiders. Ramp, like Trade Republic, relies on mostly internally grown talent. Rabois points to chief of staff roles as a talent factory, citing one company whose CMO and head of product both came from that role.
His test for any role: is it value creation, where experience matters less, or value preservation, where experience helps?
A Ramp engineering director uses AI as a second team. The director manages about 20 people and ships as much code personally as he did as an individual contributor.
Rabois says every product role is now a CEO role, and the skill is deciding what to build and why. He expects engineers with commercial instincts, who understand the company's business equation and what moves the needle, to be in demand. Quote: "the skill is more like being a CEO now."
The $44 Billion Company Automating Your Company's Finances
Sells time and savings instead of points: the typical customer cuts expenses over 5% a year and grows revenue a median 16%. Over 70,000 businesses use it, it handles over 3% of US corporate card transactions, and it has had five straight quarters of accelerating revenue growth while doubling at multibillion-dollar scale. It is building token spend management and tracks a scoreboard of dollars blocked and hours saved.
Ramp's shipping speed convinced Rabois to preempt its Series A. Ramp was close to shipping cards in about 3 months, when 9 to 12 months is the best case for the category. Keith Rabois led the seed around May 2019 and preempted the Series A that September.
Rabois judges early startups by tempo between board meetings: problems found at one meeting should be root-caused, shipped and measured by the next. Roelof Botha said Square's pace was the best since PayPal. Quote: "That speed really does compound."
Ramp mostly grows its leaders from within instead of hiring senior outsiders. Ramp, like Trade Republic, relies on mostly internally grown talent. Rabois points to chief of staff roles as a talent factory, citing one company whose CMO and head of product both came from that role.
His test for any role: is it value creation, where experience matters less, or value preservation, where experience helps?
A Ramp engineering director uses AI as a second team. The director manages about 20 people and ships as much code personally as he did as an individual contributor.
Rabois says every product role is now a CEO role, and the skill is deciding what to build and why. He expects engineers with commercial instincts, who understand the company's business equation and what moves the needle, to be in demand. Quote: "the skill is more like being a CEO now."
The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)
Austin Hay is head of marketing technology there. The team sends opportunity data back to ad networks as a synthetic event to optimize on real value and lower CAC. It uses Hightouch, and Martech moved from rev ops to the CMO org and is now moving back to rev ops.
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles
Reached $100 million in run-rate revenue in about two years with under 50 people in R&D, the fastest SaaS company to do so, and later $200 million. Runs small single-threaded pods, no bug backlog, support under 30 agents for over 400,000 users, about 13 PMs to 100+ engineers, and replaced quarterly OKRs with a biannual priorities one-pager.
Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)
Reached a $100M run rate in two years and grew 4x last year with under 500 people. It runs ordinary channels with data, automation and short cycle times, uses dollars of SQL pipeline as its North Star, and defines activation as four events in the first 30 days.
Hard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures)
Ramp was close to shipping cards in 3 months against a normal 9 to 12, so Rabois led the seed around May 2019 and preempted the Series A that September. It mostly promotes from within, and its engineering director with about 20 reports ships as much code as he did as an individual contributor, using AI as a second team.
Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
Lütke cites Ramp as one of the companies, along with Spotify, that hires for spikiness instead of credentials.
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create 100 million builders | Guillermo Rauch
Its Super Bowl ad drove 43x traffic to a site built on Vercel. One engineer who knew only Next.js kept it at 100 percent uptime for an audience of 100 million.
The ultimate guide to PR | Emilie Gerber (founder of Six Eastern)
Its bill pay launch was pitched as taking on Bill.com, which had captured only two percent of its market. CNBC covered a launch it would normally skip, and the next day a story on Bill.com's falling stock mentioned Ramp.
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)
Sold early on with someone updating dashboards manually behind the scenes.
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)
Runs on velocity and metrics, which Karri describes as almost the opposite of how Linear works. It is also a Linear customer.
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