Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)

I do think there's actually a general path that most B2B companies take and should take my views you start off with founder lit sales the early team needs to know how to actually sell then you hire your first couple of sales people and you start some very kind of low-cost targeted marketing efforts so whether it's like content Community small scale events and then PR after all of that is when you start paid and brand effort and then SEO probably start around the same time that you start paid marketing efforts the reason for the progression the way I've described it is the channels get more expensive as you go farther along and they get more effective as you understand more about your customers welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Shri bachu Shri was VP

of opposite open door then head of growth at instacart and currently he's the head of growth at Ram which as you'll hear at the top of the episode is the fastest growing SAS business and the fastest growing fintech business in history they hit a 100 million dollar yearly run rate in two years which is absurd and in the last year group 4X during a period where most companies barely grew it all I recently did a newsletter post on how Ram builts product with their VPR product Jeff Charles and in this episode we zero in on ramp's approach to growth we chat about what Ram did in the early days to Kickstart growth how they mostly grow these days how their growth team is structured their prioritization framework plus their North Star metrics also how they operationalize velocity which is at the core of their team culture ramp is a really special company that is clearly on an incredible journey and I am really excited to share this

glimpse into how they operate enjoy this episode with SRI bachu after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by atio a new type of CRM that's powerful flexible and built around your data traditional crms were built for a different era with totally different speed scale and data demands atio is different it allows you to quickly build a CRM that matches your unique workflows and data structures within minutes of connecting your email and calendar you'll have a CRM that's already set up complete with customer profiles and automatic data enrichment you'll also have real-time Dynamic reporting at your fingertips no more slow deployments outdated user experiences or tedious manual data input with atio you can build and adapt your CRM on the Fly no matter your business model or company stage atio is the CRM for fast growing startups get started today and get 15 off your first year at

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SRI welcome to the podcast thank you Lenny thanks for having me I'm a huge fan and I've been following the podcast and the newsletters excited again really appreciate that so let's talk about ramp so ramp where you lead growth is Apparently one of the fastest growing products in history I believe it's the fastest growing SAS product and business and also the fastest growing fintech business so first of all is that generally true and correct yeah I mean I'm sure you know of and he's done great analysis where he shared this work and compared us to a bunch of other companies when he released this you know a year ago we were the fastest growing company to 100 million dollars of uh you know annualized Revenue at the time I don't know if there's been others since but certainly not in the fintech category as far as I know okay so you said the fastest going to 100 million I was I think it took two years to get to

100 million in run rate right exactly that's insane because rarely is there all of this money sitting around for a company to just come in and you know and accumulate and grab from people and provide that amount of value so that's an insane stat maybe another question along these lines is there any other just stats you could share but just like the scale of ramp or just the speed that ramp has grown you publicly disclosed that last year we grew Forex on top of that you know very sizable based from the year prior and OCTA actually released some recent stats on fastest growing software companies among you know SMB and mid-market and and ramp is by far the fastest growing despite the fact that you know a bunch of others on the list were you know materially smaller companies still very lean for for the amount of growth where you know under 500 people uh roughly today at that scale and so definitely have a much

higher kind of you know uh revenue for employees than some of the competitors and others in the space and yeah I mean we've got a very thoughtful and Smart Finance team that I've worked with actually closely our old head of statistic Finance at instacart and they set ambitious goals for us on growth and uh I'm happy to say we've consistently beat those ambitious goals over the last 16 months or 18 months Etc which is especially challenging in this environment so exactly extra extra

meaningful okay so so here's the big question I want to start off with I know you weren't there at the beginning of Ram's Journey but from what you know what do you think think the team did early on to seed this level of growth and success other than just building an awesome product that people really love and if that's the answer that's that's fine but uh usually that's part of it um I'm curious just like is there any some any clever unique tactics that they use to help kind of create that incredible growth from the beginning I think you're certainly right on the product side obviously you've recently written uh about ramp's product engine uh with Jeff and there's been incredible product Market fit because of the product team that deeply understood the customer experience uh and I think that's certainly helped uh initial Word of Mouth one thing that I did want to point out that ramp did that was

interesting is you know obviously Eric and Kareem the co-founders of rap were previous founders of another company that they had a successful exit on so they had a strong you know reputation uh as Founders and uh and kind of came in with the right side of experience to build uh build RAM and one of the things that they did is what I call kind of cap table as a growth strategy where they did a great job of getting a large number of you know early stage Founders and other influential operators and advisors uh onto the cap table at the company and many of our initial customers uh were these companies uh and that you know were on the cap table or the founders were on on the cap table for and ramp today is actually not majority uh startups OR tech companies anymore the vast majority of our customers are you know uh mid-market Enterprise that's where our Revenue comes from but there's a lot of love if

among the tech founder Community because of the early days both the product quality as well as you know all of these investors that ramped on wow I have not heard of the strategy before and I didn't know this was actually a big part of the initial story so is there examples of folks that they had in their cap table that are examples of folks that help them grow initially like this like one example that I can think of is uh AIDS Elite founder uh has been very close to the ramp team same with the the pop founder and then a bunch of you know VC firms better investors in the company are also customers of the company do you know if the strategy there was VCS who connect them to small companies that would use ramp or is it directly founders of companies that would immediately use ramp yeah I'll say it was more Founders and Executives of customers that can use Ram certainly we have you know a fantastic group of very

sophisticated investors who have made introductions to ramp as well uh and that helped but I will say that is not as big of a channel as as one might expect because you know companies have their own you know decision making Frameworks for selecting a product like ramp and the investor opinion and recommendation matters but it turns out it doesn't matter maybe as much as uh as another customer who's actually used the product that they know or are actually experiencing the product amazing awesome

tactic I've not heard that before in terms of growth how much of growth of early ramp was new customers versus expansion within existing customers because what's cool about a credit card is people spend more you make more money because you're taking a piece of that so roughly how much of the growth Insanity over the first couple years was from expansion within existing customers obviously many of our early customers have grown uh quite a bit and our whole strategy is to be safe companies time and money so they can redeploy that in other ways for their own growth or other objectives and we obviously are growing our product Suite as well uh like Bill Pay Flex Etc where our customers can spend more money on ramp and get more value uh out of ramp having said all of that what's interesting is the vast majority of our growth back then and even to this day is via new customer acquisition it's just we are adding so

many more customers that the growth of our customers uh while strong and important part of our growth lover is not nearly as material as you might

think okay awesome so that's a good segue to the next question I had which is if you're going to create a pie chart of how ramp grows and ideally if you could even share like earlier on and then now like how does that pie chart look what are the kind of the slices of that pie and then what are the rough percentages of where growth comes from rather than the specifics one thing I'll say about the growth system today is if you were to look at you know what percentage of our our business comes from outbound sales paid marketing you know field and then a bunch of other channels and then you compare it against industry benchmarks I think the the secret sauce of ramp is not that we've found a channel that's like unique and that we've over invested or underinvested I I don't think our distribution would be not that far off from you know looking at other companies at our size and Stage I think what we've

done differently is we've really focused on making all of those Investments very much driven by technology and data and so like one example that I'll have I'll give you is like our sales teams are actually incredibly efficient by any metric uh that we look at and we obviously Benchmark them and and the reason for that is because we actually have a growth engineering team uh that's dedicated to supporting that uh that efficiency but including you know adjusting third-party data and uh and using AI to automate uh much of their workflow Etc and we've been doing this well before AI has become you know the buzzword for for a lot of folks but this is something you know we've had this team for almost two years now that that's been working on sales Automation and data to just make our sales teams more efficient that's just one example but we've got similar types of mandates for for every channel that we invested

in and thinking about how do we inform this better customer and Prospect data and how do we automate and technologize so that we can build that competitive

mode for your channel I'd love to learn more about this growth Edge team that works with sales how is that structured maybe as a first question and then just like what is there what are their goals how do you measure their progress and success you know a lot of companies do do it you know differently I think what works really well uh with uh ramp is that we have the same shared goal uh which is the pipeline driven and the payback period of the channel it's it's kind of unique to ramp where the engineers feel ownership of the quota they're not like owning product metrics or or what have you done there are obviously of course interim and input metrics that are important but uh but they really do feel accountable for the the pipeline driven and the efficiency driven by that team and I think that naturally allows them bottom up to come up with the right projects that they think will have maximal impact on

efficiency and Topline so what are the sorts of things they do for a sales team is it like they help them prioritize leads or is it they help craft their messaging like which parts of the maybe most important all of the above helping find the right prospects uh sending them the right messaging as well as prioritizing responses and then drafting uh potential responses for the team as well fascinating how much impact could be seen that has on sales it's incredibly helpful to our to our sales team and it's one of our most efficient channels as I've mentioned so I think that there is something unique about uh but our ability to bring technology to

everything super interesting maybe on that topic can you just talk about how your growth team is structured at Ram what are the kind of sub teams and how do you think about we've got an organization today that might evolve and if we get to that topic we can talk about it but historically the way we've been organized is we've got Channel based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel so we've got a paid marketing team a lifecycle CRM team we've got field marketing team Etc and then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting you know growth and sales uh and and helping each of these channels be be more effective that's dedicated uh to growth and then separate from that we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or Skunk Works type of team that works on cross-channel uh just things that don't neatly fit into a box that we think could be cool or fun to try to just do

more experimentation that's that has

crossed our own cross team definitely sounds like the most fun team what are some of the things they've done or work on in the Skunk Works team they've done like you know uh testing of new channels that don't necessarily fit into like a very and that includes like new online platforms like they've done some interesting stuff on Tick Tock and Reddit and other places uh things like that uh they focused on kind of uh referrals and how to make that a more delightful experience for the customers um first party events uh things like that things that are often kind of smaller scale and if they work we can invest more and make them larger scale later I love it okay so the teams roughly is there's a paid growth team that just works on paid growth optimization lifecycle CRM kind of team basically it's like emails I imagine is a big part of that then there's a field sales support team yeah and then there's

the sales team you kind of engine sales team they talked about and also imagine there's like a self-serve yeah exactly there's a self-serve activation inch team as well and then I missed the four series there's SEO and kind of like website and uh and and inbound lead Channel management and then this awesome Skunk Works team I love it yeah okay so

shifting a little bit something that comes across uh often and consistently with ram and this came across very clearly in the post that I did on how Ram pills product with Jeff is velocity and how important velocity is at ramp there's this awesome code that I'll read here from Keith or boy who's uh who I think led many of the rounds of ramp he started Founders fun famous investor he said that Rams product velocity is absolutely unprecedented in my 21 years working with technology businesses so here's my question to you can you just talk about what that actually looks like and feels like working inside ramp with this intense velocity yeah uh uh it's a great question and Keith is you know amazing and probably one of the smartest semesters that I've ever had the Good Fortune working with uh both here as well as at Open Door and uh and I'll say like he's absolutely right about that and what you kind of

see internally is what I'll say is like a razor sharp focus on reducing cycle time and biased action and you know how do we reduce cycle time I think it's basically the core of it culturally to me is getting people to think about smaller units of time for decision making seems obvious but uh I think you really have to reinforce it culturally so one thing that uh Eric our CEO does which I don't know if you've heard externally is uh we we have like days.rank.com where we can see how many days it's been since the founding of ramp internally and it's date 1529 at ramp he has that number of days at every board meeting at every all hands it's just to remind people that we don't work in years order you know weeks we work in days each day matters uh and so never put out something tomorrow that you can get done today uh and and that bias to action um really permeates not just uh you know in the product teams but everywhere so

our you know growth team which as I've just described is extremely cross-functional you know a lot of marketing folks and other expertise on the team but we work a lot like a product team we work on two-week Sprints uh we cross prioritize across these teams and uh and we work all together um rather than in kind of separate silos uh within the growth team okay so I pulled up the site you just mentioned days.ramp.com and not only is it days since launch which is 1529 when I'm looking at it there's a many decimal points fifteen hundred twenty nine point four three four five three one four two oh my God okay is that was that a new addition the decimal points no I think that's always been there it's like it's you know it's just I'm picking it up you know I don't know how much time is passing you know it could be it could be stressful at times but I think that the uh the mitigating factor is that it's

been able you know as you know a players want to work with a players attract a players and routine a players and rap uh has done a really great job of uh hiring people that are fantastic that can work in this environment well and are motivated by the success uh from uh from this sort of culture yeah I was actually talking to Eric about a for another piece I'm working on and he was showing me some early board decks in every deck as you said as like days day 544 of RAM so it's very real what you're talking

about is there anything else that just like as someone that came into RAM from other traditional companies that also move really fast instacart and open door that is just like holy moly this is this is velocity you know you talked about a few things but is there anything just like holy you can see the cycle time thing in terms of responsiveness from uh everybody at ramp and I think typically what you tend to see is like as companies get bigger they evolve you know off of uh slack to email and like everything just kind of moves a little bit slower and there's process and uh and and then there's obviously a lot of good parts of that but ramp what I noticed when I joined and true to this day is like how quickly people will respond on slack and uh and jump on things uh and even if they don't complete it like there's very clear like action item on who the owner will be and what the deadline uh will be uh even if

it's not and uh and and that to me was always very impressive uh just and I think it's one of those things and we build it public so everything is like very visible so you can see how this is working across teams and uh and I'm glad that we've been able to kind of maintain that culture even as we've gotten much bigger there's two kind of effects of that I imagine one is how do you stay in the flow and get work done if you're just expected to constantly respond how does that actually work I don't think the expectation is necessarily that one constantly responds but it is something that uh I have seen people are good at uh and so I think one of the things that again not like a novel productivity tool but uh something that uh ramp does uh do is just trying to think about like Focus time and response times and using calendar blocking to really effectively manage your time that way and then doing

calendar audits of yourself as well as uh of your team to say okay what are your highest priorities for this week this day this month and and how does your calendar reflect your priorities because in many ways you ship your calendar and so thinking about how are you spending your time and then blocking your time and is this mostly a cultural kind of just this is how we operate or is there principles or sorts of like processes that are set up to help people do those sorts of things yeah it's it's cultural uh in terms of how we operate but we also have templates like our people team has a temple on how to do a calendar audit properly uh and things like that so we've we've tried to you know create some Learning Materials as well for for folks that are new to you know get into the flow of this of way of

working awesome okay so then the other elephant in the room with talking about working really fast and hard and responding really quickly is work-life balance and burnout and things like that one thing I'll say is I believe in working really hard and working long hours as a important ingredient to success I know there's been a bit of a backlash against that and just like no you shouldn't work really hard you can be successful without doing that I don't think that's true so with that said I guess what have you learned and what have you think what do you think ramp has learned about how to find that balance and not just yeah and yeah it's it's it's I completely agree with you I do think uh especially earlier in your career uh hard work is is so important both for for learning but also impact and it's a tough balance that a lot of successful companies struggle with I think my biggest learnings is AIDS like some of it is

like self-selection right you're hiring people that are excited about doing this work uh and uh and then this way of uh of working but at least I tend to find the people that I've worked with that are highly successful hours are not the problem it's really you know autonomy flexibility and uh and you know Mission alignment and the general happiness they get from their work right and so that's what I try to focus on which is like not the you know hours that someone's put in but quality of the the work and and the impact and uh and I think a big part of the the push to having great results uh and working hard is is really being grateful and appreciating the team when they do push themselves and I'm celebrating wins and I think we've done we could always be doing a better job but I think we've historically done a great job at that and celebrating wins uh you know big and small and I think part of that like the culture of kind of

building in public and open internally uh helps with that uh so people are always sharing their wins and then it's a very uh one funny stat that I don't know if other companies track is uh we track engagement during uh All Hands uh on the zoom uh to see what percentage people like participate and it's like usually close to 100 like people are talking like the entire company is talking on the zoom chat because they're excited about the wins that their friends and colleagues are shipping and then and the things that we're talking about in the audience how do you actually track engagement and someone sitting there watching who's in the chat no it must be some tool RIT team can do it uh it can say what percentage of participants uh chatted or something like that I see so it's not like who's looking at the screen it's like who's talking in the chat yeah exactly or reacting uh in the chat Etc yeah that's

awesome and it's not like you must engage it's more just like are we delivering and by the way like this is probably the first time I'm sharing this like I don't think ramp employees necessarily know this I don't think we've actually shared this I I just heard it uh from uh our I.T person recently and I thought a fun stuff I love that because it's not like yeah it's more just like are we providing value to people or are they actually excited and interested in this sort of thing I was gonna add on to your point about how working hard and working long hours can be seen as this like oh this sucks I wish I was at home watching Netflix but I find that the most fulfilling parts of my career where I was just working insanely hard for a long time as long as that work was meaningful exactly like you said it was something that mattered and came out and shipped and people were excited about it and if

it wasn't like oh that was a waste of my life so that super resonates yeah I want

to come back to growth for a moment I had a couple more questions I wanted to ask here you talked about some of these teams that you have around ways you're driving growth is there area you think you're going to be investing more in over time or that you feel is working better I know there's you know Trade Secrets here that you don't want to share necessarily but just anything that you feel is like people are maybe under appreciating or under investing in that you think you might invest in more well what I'll say on the up front is look we like everybody else are always focused on driving more efficiency in our growth engine uh there are some channels that you know and we have a diversified you know portfolio of bets right like one thing that's kind of interesting about the world of growth today is I think historically people that used to run growth were folks that had a marketing or kind of a product background and what

you're seeing these days I think are more folks like me who actually come from an investor an analytics background uh to lead growth teams because growth has become more and more about a diversified portfolio of bets at a reasonable Roi and building a system that's designed around experimentation and data oriented right so the reason I say all of that is our our goal is to over time of course make all of our channels more efficient but also allocate more to channels that are are more efficient as long as they're scalable right and so the more that we can push you know customer awareness via you know owned and earned media the the better uh for us and so we've got you know a few different strategies on that front but we're also working on making our other channels more efficient by the day so mysterious but I appreciate you sharing what you can you the point about the portfolio bets is interesting because if you think

about it most companies initially grow from one you talked about growth engines that's the same term I use usually there's like one thing that helps you grow initially like SEO or word of mouth or maybe paid and then eventually every single company basically ends up doing all the growth channels and then has a team dedicated to like just keep optimizing SEO keep optimizing referrals so I think that's a very typical path and then it's exactly said how do we make each of these as efficient as

possible yeah maybe as a another last question around ramps growth is there any other just really surprising interesting really effective tactics that helped Ram grow over time I I think one thing that's been interesting is Ram's ability to leverage PR uh as a growth machine um and as you've seen like we've got a fantastic PR and Collins team and uh and then we get a lot of deserved good you know press uh through that and one thing that's a bit interesting is our fundraising also as a growth strategy kind of like not obviously explicitly we've got very clear goals for for our fundraising but what we have seen is any time that we've been fundraising it we've been using that as an effective way of creating a market moment uh it's driven actually a non-trivial amount of top of funnel for us people always talk about PR being like yeah people over over invest in PR they think they are going to be this magical grid lever but

it actually works sometimes and in my opinion it just you have to have something really interesting for it to work and obviously you guys do it's the other companies growing like crazy which is innately an interesting story the founders are really important and rarely is funding like an event anymore for most companies so I think it's that I mean it says a lot that people care about your funding what you said is exactly right is you have to be thoughtful about your PR moments like everybody wants to announce things about themselves that's not necessarily interesting for the press or for an audience uh and so thinking about how do you compile enough value uh to the general audience um with so our fundraising announcements usually also have some additional you know color on on something unique about the business uh that we share uh to you know provide more value to readers and then there's

also newsletter people like me and pack you mentioned who wrote about ramp because it's also just so interesting what's your sense of that versus traditional PR there's this like I don't know big debate of just like traditional media is no longer relevant all these other people will go through newsletters and podcasts and things like that with your sense there it's uh you know what are the audiences that you get uh with each of these tactics right um and so we we do you know both obviously get uh some earned uh coverage in these new newsletters and other tactics and and we pay for some and we advertise in in other cases and uh and what we tend to find is like these are great reach but they tend to work very well for uh actually hiring uh it improves Ram's reputation as a company for recruiting and hiring which uh which helps and and they help with a certain audience of customers which is typically

Tech Founders and uh and folks close to the tech ecosystem but as I mentioned you know the vast majority of the world is not startups and the majority of ramps customers are no longer attacking startups and uh and so as we're thinking about ways to grow I think channels like these are are one piece of the equation but I think traditional PR will automate another really important piece because they just Target a different audience as you're talking and watching the days count up on this days that Rampage still and stressing me out I feel like keeping you from doing work to keep growing ramp but let's keep going I'm gonna close

this tab you talked about growth engines I'm curious what you've learned about building a growth engine in a company and another way to put is just a repeatable repeatable scalable growth process whether it's at ramp or Open Door instacart people talk a lot about you know what should the right you know design of the team be or you know profiles of people on the team um Etc and I'm I'm happy to talk about what are the right profiles of people I think that's an important conversation but I think like design of the team people often I think it's a red herring about team structure and team design and what's the right one uh et cetera I think most of that is irrelevant what actually matters is culture and rituals and cadences rather than the the team itself and so uh what a great growth engine and a great growth team is one that where you set the culture like set very simple you know North Star metrics usually one at most

two right and uh and you've created a culture of defining hypotheses that are data driven and a culture where that can be executed quickly and have like an MVP kind of mentality for product and non-product uh projects right uh where people can can fail and learn quickly uh and iterate quickly so I think that part of it is more important than the specific people uh or or their functions in many ways to me especially when you're starting to build a growth engine it's like can you build a set of people that can generate new ideas and evaluate them uh effectively and move quickly uh is really what you're trying to design

for let's let's unpack some of this because this is great so in terms of Northstar metrics what are some examples in your experience of good Nordstrom metrics like revenue is obviously a very common one but often it kind of is too high level is you have a sense of what a good North Star metric is I I like having you know kind of two right one is something around volume and growth uh and you want that to be a like very motivating and like intuitive for people to understand and also be something that the growth teams can directly impact right revenue is For Better or Worse more important for the company but also much further down the you know line uh of whether or not the growth team can impact that right and so instacart for example our North Star metric for for growth was monthly active orders and that's what we all rallied around and looked at every day you know what are our amount doing and then obviously we

had a large growth in consumer and engineering team at instacart 300 plus people and uh and so there are people working on every single corner of the app and and outside of the amp on acquisition uh to to drive growth and and it's like some of the stuff is like minutia right it's like making the checkout flow slightly better or faster or something like that so that's a good example right it's like okay well so we're gonna go that team on Mao like how are they gonna move you know monthly active orders by making the checkout flow slightly better maybe they can have an impact or maybe not and so one of the things that we did is the actual you know local team has their own metric that they can directly influence like you want to actually you know hold people accountable for things that they can influence and then recreate it via you know the finance and data team a translation layer for every team's

metric into Mount it would be like if you got one extra weekly order because of your checkout flow from the same customer it would have like point x impact on you know the company's mouth and then we would just roll up all project plans as well as project impact back into this like singular uh malametric and uh and and the other benefit of doing something like that is that it also helps you cross prioritize much easier right should we add more engineering to this team should we add more budget to that team it's like okay well what's the mile map like where is there more mile per dollar or per engineer uh being built uh and it just really helped us unify and move together I have questions about this is great by the way what why is it monthly active orders versus just monthly orders how can you be an inactive order sorry order uh okay so like monthly active users basically is what it is but we call them

orders because users can just log in and not order right got it you're actually ordering uh um yeah I think there's this backlash against users at Facebook I think it's monthly active people and so I get it okay understood interesting so you find that instead of sub teams having a different metric that we just know is good that's like one of the variables in the formula of monthly active orders you actually have a translation that converts that specific metric moving to the North Star metric yeah the team on their day-to-day for their Sprints whatever are looking at their own metric but for the purpose of planning and resource allocation and Reporting uh we would use the translation layers uh to to actually just look at everything on a mile basis knowing those sorts of formulas are often not perfect how much weight do you put into that that formula and and I think like in general like the planning

process is not perfect right like you can have a financial plan uh in Excel and the reality uh can diverge quite a bit the only thing you can be certain of is that you're not going to accomplish exactly the plan so we did a couple of things uh too bad it's one is like you know setting a culture of like we know this isn't perfect this is like 70 30 80 20. uh it's to die so like we wouldn't use the translation factor to make like a marginal decision right like should we like you know if something is five or ten percent off those are done based on judgment because at the end of the day regardless of what metric framework you use marginal decisions or marginal for a reason they're really hard things to to decide and so the the framework helped with like just reducing the cognitive overload of decision making to only those that are you know marginal right so the ones that are obvious that are

going to have a big impact like it becomes clear even if the measurement framework isn't perfect uh and and so that's kind of reviews and the other thing that we just have Cadence is we would actually update all of the translations every six months uh for the new planning cycle So based on new information that we knew on how you know moving X impacts wow just to make it

even more real what are some examples of those lower level metrics like is it like increased conversion of sign up by X percent any number of things like it would be actually like load time of the app not open uh there's a team that's like trying to make that faster and more efficient because we know that that impacts whether that person actually ends up ordering if it takes five seconds fluid versus you know two seconds to load uh and so so that so the full customer experience like we're uh all um segregated into different teams that were optimizing so it's like how long does it take to open okay like number of searches that a user does on the app we know that people you know uh and like number of items that are put into cart like amount of time from card to checkout things like that would be just like we literally just like map out the any user's Journey throughout the app and have like separate engineering teams

that are uh focused on that and there's essentially some kind of regression analysis that tells you here's load times impact on Mouse exactly and the other thing that we did is uh just so we would have these translation factors we could also just see what the cumulative impact of all of the work is that Facebook did this too which is just long-term holdouts right uh for each surface area so the checkout experience team that I've been talking about a lot for some reason uh would have their own holdout and so we could see what the cumulative impact of you know monthly active orders on the people that got last half's experience versus this hats experience uh on the old out and that would make it very clear so regression is one way to do it you know uh and then basically effective a B test but with a small holdout is there a holdout for the performance team where someone just has a really slow version

of instacart I uh I wonder actually um that uh but there is hold out for almost everything there's a holdout for ads for example so there are some lucky instacart users out there that are not getting ads and they've never gotten ads uh because they've always been part of uh instacart's advertising that'll be a great uh Revenue boost whenever they want to kill them that's executive imagine was a conversation internally and like should there be a permit hold out should it be like last year's experience like how should we think about especially because it's such an important driver of modernization this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like DraftKings zapier click up twitch and Cameo rely on EPO to power their experiments wherever you work running experiments is increasingly essential but there are no commercial tools that

integrate with a modern grow team stack this leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool when I was at Airbnb one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and dice data by device types country user stage EPO does all that and more delivering results quickly avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover Apple lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation retention subscription and payments EPO supports tests on the front end on the back end email marketing even machine learning claims check out eppo.com that's getepo.com and 10x your experiment velocity

maybe just one last question along this specific thread is this framework of having everything translated into a North star metric something you bring to every place you work now is this just something you recommend like for example this ramp approach things this way as well I think it depends on the size of the company right like I think I think this actually becomes much more important as companies get bigger because there's more teams to prioritize and more resources to cross-allocate and having a common currency uh makes that a lot easier and so we do something similar uh at ramp as well where we have translation factors for all of the various things the teams are doing that translate back to the north star uh for right cool and then are you up for sharing the Rams North Star metric or do you want to keep that uh yeah I mean like I can tell you what we used to do in the recent past were evolving some

things but in in the recent past it was for for the growth team the North Star was dollars of SQL pipeline so anything anybody did we would try to estimate the impact into what would be the dollars of uh you know sales qualified lead pipeline uh generated for for rent so if you know the website team wanted to change language uh on you know the cards landing page their direct impact could be conversion rate right of email submission or something like that would be what they would be optimizing for and then we would have okay what is two bits of conversion rate mean for dollars of SQL pipeline a lot or not a lot and depending on that it's like all right don't waste your time doing that project let's do something else instead so uh that just helps us uh score and prioritize efforts here's a fun story I actually tried to sign up for ramp when I was starting this newsletter and business and it didn't let me because I

don't it was yeah as I moved on and I would have been such a such a huge Revenue opportunity I'm just joking I know I know and I'm glad you brought that up because we are obviously uh aware of it and we are working on something uh for users that have uh put in a personal email address oh my God in terms of how to regulation you're about to 5x growth yeah because I had no other domain at that point now I have you know Lenny's newsletter and stuff so I was like I'm stuck by the way for anybody else that has that problem they can just reach out to me we'll we'll figure it out the reason we don't allow personal emails is because it's just typically very low intent users that are coming to the website that are putting in personal emails makes sense I totally get it I was not offended I just like all right I had like no way around it that's the problem so I like that you guys are adding some some path around it and

you're saying email you or uh reach out to you yeah you can find me on Twitter or email me I'm just I spot you a ramp uh yeah all right you're gonna have the most uh sales leads of any person at ramp when this comes out okay one other

thing I want to touch on is Success metrics you talked about one of the keys to success and this kind of repeatable growth engine is clear success metrics is there any just learnings and tips you have for people when they're thinking about success metrics finding the right success metrics there's usually should be two there should be one on volume and another one on efficiency and we can talk about what are good efficiency metrics and what are good volumetrics on um volume uh I think the right success metric has a couple things that are important one is there's a clear linkage to Value creation for the business so if I move this metric that will drive revenue and which will drive Equity value for the business or whatever it is that uh that this particular metric metrics right and for Facebook it was Mal for instacart it was effectively monthly active orders and uh it's something that we know is important that

will really Drive uh the the value for the business but it needs to have the other component of it which which is it's very intuitive for all the people working internally to the company and it's also clear how if they're working on some minutia how that can impact and actually move uh the the main metric so it's usually like you have to find something that's somewhere in between not too far too lag you know uh towards revenue and value creation but also not you know something that's actually like translatable to the efforts of various teams is there an example of a good success metric that just comes to mind to make this a little bit concrete for people it just depends on what your you know goal at any given time is right sometimes you're trying to drive more users sometimes you're trying to drive more engagement and you can reorient the company on what you're trying to do as the North Star for growth during that

period of time and so we've I mean users obviously we've talked about as a good one like for engagement I think it's it's uh I've often found what really helps is and you've done actually really good benchmarking at some point like the escape Velocity metric for for growth for a living company I think I don't think you phrase it that way but that's probably I like that right for a given user which is uh you know what does it take for somebody to become an Engaged and active you know user or customer of a platform and uh and at Facebook it was like what 10 friends the first seven days at uh at instacart it was uh you know three orders in the first month and it ramped for our activation we've got like I mean it's like very specific to ramp but we've got like four events that the customer needs to do in the first 30 days and if they do that they have a high likelihood of being activated and

successful so our activation team focuses on that the framework you just described reminds me Gibson Biddle has this really simple framework of gem where you can basically purchase one of three things growth engagement or monetization and his advice is always just like all of them are great just make sure you're all aligned on which one matters most at the time yeah uh and it's very similar to you know we used to have this at Open Door and I think doordash also uses a similar framework which is you know speed quality and cost like all three are important but it's very hard to optimize all three at the same time so you need to have you know a particular uh prioritization and I think growth teams can also use that it's like okay like I think uh the way I think about the growth team's journey is like Step One is like build a system that can move fast and then like work on improving the quality and then work on you know

optimization of cost uh after so similarly you pick which phase you're on because you can't do all three at the same time uh whether it's growth engagement monetization or just the other uh way of thinking about speaking

of metrics I have this note here that you're a big fan of payback period for measuring investment Roi versus CAC can you talk about why that is yeah so a lot of people you know CAC obviously gets thrown around a lot a lot of people are like okay you have to be reducing your cat there's a fundamental flock of it which uh obviously is that you're focusing on cost and not the value drive right and so when you focus on CAC and reducing CAC what tends to happen is you uh actually might be doing something very damaging where you're succeeding in reducing CAC but you're actually bringing in customers that are less valuable um because those are the ones that you're able to attract uh with a lower pack and and so reframing it away from cap towards LTD is helpful and that's better right so thinking about okay like for better customers that are bigger we want to spend more so you might think okay well LTB to CAC might be a better

way of looking at that I think the challenge with ultimate account especially for a lot of even ramp right is only four years old is it's really hard to predict LTV it's like a DCF it's extremely assumption Laden and uh and it's hard to know you know what uh the final value will be and especially if you think your turn is low and your LTB is very high you might end up spending a lot of money because you're like oh like my LGBT account is great and then a year or two into the business you realize actually your chart is higher than you thought your initial customers aren't representative of your long-term uh you know retention and all of a sudden you've destroyed a lot of value by looking at LGBT account which is why I'm like a big big fan of uh of payback period and you know and I'm actually being really thoughtful about that using you know contribution margin not revenue or gross margin like how long of

contribution margin from this customer does it take to pay back their cost and and you know setting this obviously is typically a mandate from the executive and board level uh like what is the payback period that we comfortable with and then just orienting everybody uh towards driving that Blended payback period down as much as possible for

folks that aren't familiar with the concept of payback period or contribution margin can just briefly describe what those mean for listeners yeah uh so uh contribution margin is basically the profit that you make on a given customer after you take into account all of the variable costs so including the cost of production as well as any other variable cost to serve that customer so that might include support and other things that scale with your uh with your revenue and then payback period is literally just how many months of that profit uh would it take to pay for let's say it cost you five thousand dollars to acquire this customer and your estimated profit per month on the customer is 500 that is a 10 month payback period so as I say that I'm sure you've heard there you still have to make assumptions for payback period but at least they're more based in recency and you can evaluate them more quickly

awesome thank you for doing that just a

couple more questions around growth specifically so there's a lot of ways to grow through the history of a company you can invest in SEO you can invest in paid in sales and referrals and influencer marketing brand marketing Billboards all these things do you have an opinion on how to sequence these sorts of bets for a company especially in B2B of course a lot depends on who your customers are what your unique value propositions are and you know how competitive uh the space that you're in but I do think there's actually like a general path that most B2B companies take and should take frankly which is like my view is you start off with like thunderlet sales like the early team needs to know how to actually sell uh then you hire your first couple of sales people and you start some very kind of low-cost targeted marketing efforts so whether it's like content Community small scale events and then PR and and

after all of that is when you start paid and brand efforts uh and then you know SEO probably started on the same time that you start paid marketing efforts the reason for the progression that we have described it is the channels get more expensive uh as you go farther along and they get more effective as you understand more about your customers and they're more scalable as well as you go further along uh you know the list that I've described uh and so that's the intention behind sequencing in that way SEO is a bit unique and the reason I recommend it later uh rather than earlier even it's not necessarily that expensive is uh just take some time to build and without domain Authority or backlinking or any media presence you can end up just like flailing with SEO creating content and not getting any actual you know traction for a long time so there's like usually a good inflection point for your company to

double that SEO efforts and it's somewhat a little bit later than some of the other channels this touches on a great line that you have around experimentation where you talk about how you don't want to just fail fast with an experiment you want to fail conclusively if that's the word can you is that right and then can you talk yeah I I talk uh a lot about that with my teams uh both here and other places which is you know a like we celebrate failure uh growth uh experiments in my history uh are typically like 30 ish success rate so the vast majority of things that you try don't work and so you want to create a culture where people aren't afraid to take risks and

and I'm afraid to fail and for me failure is not that you didn't drive Revenue failure is not learning like so it's really important that you learn when you fail uh and uh and so we we celebrate failure as long as you're learning and and you can only learn if you've designed the right test and you failed conclusively because otherwise I think many of us have been in situations where there's intuition that something might work and it doesn't work and then you end up doing it over and over for years like because every time I knew executive or somebody else has the same idea you try it again and uh and it's because you haven't been able to design the test to fail conclusively and it's hard to do but at the end of the day there's only two two ways to you know make a an experiment successful uh either you have a very large n uh or you have a very significant treatment which is like you know what you're doing in

the experiment itself and you know in B2B you don't usually have the luxury of large M which you do in consumer right you know Facebook can get stats taken two hours uh you know a B2B company it could take two years to get to the same number of you know touch points and uh and so to counteract that I recommend people like just trying to maximize the treatment effect which is like if you have a hypothesis that you're testing just throw all of the possible tactics and resources that you think would move that needle because you can always cost rationalize later if it works right uh and so just maximize the treatment effect and if with all of that it didn't work then you can say hey like we're not going to try this again uh because we literally did try it everything that we could to test this hypothesis and if it doesn't work in the best version and it's expensive as it is this is not worth spending more time on uh but if it

does work great then you you know do another version of the test with like half the tactics or whichever taxes you think work better or worse uh and you optimize over time is there an example you could share when you did that I mean account based marketing is something that is very common in uh Enterprise uh software right where you've selected uh you know uh certain customers that you think are high priority and you you're saying I want to touch them in as many you know nuanced ways possible uh to see if that drives conversion and this is something you know I've seen tried many times where people do it but they kind of you know uh do it halfway where they're like okay try these three things conversion of the control group like wasn't higher uh and so were you know we think it's just not gonna work and then a new go-to-market executive comes and they have to do it again they have to do it again it's like

a very common one wherever this happens and uh and so when we did it at ramp uh we we did exactly you know what I just described which is like let's really be thoughtful about the experiment design both in terms of what maximizing the number of people as well as you know maximizing the number of ways and types of ways that were effectively uh touching these Target customers to to show the value so what it sounds like is the hypothesis isn't like this email will have a big impact on conversion it's like this strategy of coming after customers is what we're testing that's the example there right like and I think like if you for example if you have the it's a this kind of framework is more important for cross-functional larger scale bigger tests uh rather than like you know an email modification right but you can even use it on a micro example like an email modification right where you are like okay I think this particular email

is underperforming because it's not talking to this part of the customer's pain point or Journey or whatever and uh and you could just the simplest test would be okay let me make some tweaks and to the text and edit that and that could be the end of that test and if that doesn't work you're like oh maybe those weren't the right text edits let me do different text edits or whatever and that's fine that's low cost that's not the end of the world and it's uh for you to be wrong there but an alternative that you could do is like oh what are all of the things that I could change about this email uh in the same test is it the trigger of the email is it the text content of the email is it uh you know additional personalization is it the design of the email like trying to think about what are all of the various numbers that uh you think could be wrong and put them all together to test your hypothesis of this touch

point is wrong uh and how do I improve that well obviously the downside of that is you don't if it doesn't work you don't know if it's like oh maybe it was this thing could have worked in the subject yeah yeah so there's always trade-offs on this and so but what you're hoping is like you've done a complete refresh where it you did all the things that you thought were intuitive that should work and if it doesn't work then you're like okay maybe my hypothesis is wrong but you're right there's always going to be a challenge if maybe the execution is wrong uh and I did too many things uh potentially in that case how does that go with the velocity culture is it just do those things real fast uh even though it's a lot it's not like micro optimize it's like go bigger but do them fast yeah yeah so that's why I think it's like important to to frame where this matters right uh and so I uh I think I I'm less worried about failing

conclusively for things that uh are you can fail really really fast and and just redo right things like website conversion email Etc I'm more worried about that for things that take a while to plan uh and cost money uh got it okay great

maybe one last question around growth specifically what are some of your favorite tools for the growth team either internally whatever you can share or externally that just allow you to operate efficiently and effectively a couple of things that we've uh used I mean one simple thing is you know for Sprint planning actually we use airtable uh because the planning process and the scoring is so much more Analytical in the translation layer so we've got like a template on how we do our student planning and how we translate the various impact metrics into the common currency uh which which I enjoy but I don't think it has to be our table it's just some form of organization that works well for that uh in terms of a very tactical you know growth tool that we've enjoyed recently is uh we use this company called Mutiny which is also around customer uh which is a tool for um website copy uh personalization so

they they hook up with our third-party data sources that we pay for and based on what we know about the customer as they're landing on our page we can personalize copy InDesign uh based on that and that's that's how like you know material impact and allowed us to scale you know website experimentation amazing and then are there internal tools you build to help with experimentation or I don't know sharing data dashboard Anna is there anything else that's just like wow this really helps us move fast Eric is our CEO has publicly talked about this I think we as a company are very thoughtful about what we build in-house versus you know what we uh buy externally I think a lot of engineering teams are often excited about building things in-house where there's you know off-the-shelf products that could basically work externally and and ramp has historically been good at not falling into that trap uh and and we use

you know third-party tools for uh for a lot of our uh you know growth and and experimentation for things that are not you know proprietary strategic et cetera obviously like some of the automation stuff that we've talked about we've built all of that uh in-house in terms of you know prospecting lead scoring and uh and how we talk to our customers but uh but for the most part we use uh external tools instacart and open door we're not like that because we built our own internal like experimental tracking systems uh an A B testing Frameworks uh and all of that uh that's what I would have guessed about ramp that is uh with speed you gotta not build stuff you don't have to build so that makes a lot of sense

okay maybe one last topic to talk about I want to talk about hiring you have some really interesting approaches to how to think about hiring one is I think you have a really interesting strategy for how to find the best companies and also the best people at each of those companies to go after if you're hiring for specific role can you talk about how you think about that Google on Twitter has talked about some of those which is like uh there's kind of two ways to go about hiring uh great people one way is uh basically a very thoughtful and tactical Network search where like let's say you're hiring for a head of SEO you go ask your network of who is the best SEO person you know get introduction to each of those folks and then ask them who the best uh person to they know is and you have a mapping uh you know where uh where the best SEO teams and uh and why uh and if you can't get one of those people 20 30 people on

your target list you kind of go down the list of okay like what is the next best person you typically want to limit it to companies that are one to two stages of growth uh after you so you want somebody that has seen you know your stage of growth uh and Beyond at a company that has a reputation for craft in the field that you're looking for so that's a very classic way of doing that and I think that works really well for people and companies that are really well connected right uh and uh and then so there's another approach that I've actually used successfully uh is uh is much more kind of data driven uh and kind of external and not as network based which is you can often look up uh data if it's birthdays a lot of it is like somewhat public right so you can look up uh information on which companies uh might be doing well so for example I'll just pick like if you're looking for great email marketing folks

like CRM marketing lead or something like that you can actually look up on similar web like what percentage of traffic shows up via email to companies websites so you've got your target list of companies that are one or two stage Beyond you that you respect as general companies and you can go and see okay which ones are these are actually really effective at driving web traffic or app traffic or app downloads via uh via their email uh and then go try to Source uh from those uh teams and companies and I think people underutilize that even though it's very intuitive right it's just not something that occurs to people to do I love that I've not heard that tip right there the first piece Google definitely recommends this and I think the core part of that is like The Core theme Here is find the companies that are the best at the thing you're trying to hire for and then figure out who at the company

is the best once you start talking to people I love it another strong opinion that I

think you have is around paying people and how much to pay the best um can you talk about that yeah I I think there's a lot of um conversation around compensation uh is very much focused on like equality and like narrowing the Gap and bands uh for for compensation and I think personally I know it's a bit of a spicy tape maybe but I think it's like the exact opposite direction of the conversation that companies should be having about uh about compensation which is I I strongly strongly believe that small teams of successful people can drive a lot more impact uh than larger teams of mediocre people and so I strongly believe you have to design a system where you're able to reward Timex operators with 10x the the con and I actually do think the you certainly see that at the executive level right so if you look at the same exactly about different companies of similar stages the comp can be wildly different based

for a variety of reasons but one of them is the perception of performance and potential by the management team right uh and uh and I think people need to be thinking about how to do that across more levels which is if you can do that and if you do that well I think you're able to differentially hire and uh retain uh the best talent and that'll be a great competitive Advantage for companies that can do level and do you think about this like within a team pay the best people the most or is it more only higher these 10x people and then pay everyone the most you know people think of like the talent density of your company as dependent on hiring uh that's obviously true it's an important part of the ecosystem uh and the first part but it's it's equally dependent on retention and Performance Management a lot of companies can be good at hiring but hiring has pretty high rate of false positive like

interview is the worst best way to hire a Salvation right uh and then there's lots of ways you can make the interviewing process better make it more interactive make it uh uh you know uh more effective but at the end of the day you still don't know about someone uh until you really work closely with the new team with the new mandate uh at your at your company so I think it's not about necessarily hiring connects operators obviously you're looking for that but it's also about investing in people that are doing well and accelerating their uh their growth and rewards based on impact once they're there and as well as you know managing out people uh directly that that didn't work out I mean and I I typically think it's like you know almost never uh when I've had to you know uh part ways with people is because someone's a bad actor uh it's almost always that like you know it just wasn't the right fit for for

whatever reason for their skill set uh for their life goals whatever it may be and it just wasn't a fit uh for that role and I think a lot of companies are hesitant to make those changes and I think that's how they bring their talent bar down frankly

absolutely agree tree is there anything else that you wanted to touch on before we get to our very exciting lightning round I don't know how many people will use this I'm still surprised when uh when new folks come to me and it's like I need to write by the way like uh like a document of like how do you work with me because I I know it's like uh a lot of people have been talking about I think Clarity Johnson's talked about Instagram but I I say that like my love languages are like spreadsheets and Frameworks uh and uh and one very simple one that I've always liked that uh some types of crucified here but it's most Consultants now is uh is what we call misi mutually exclusive collectively exhausted side of things so whenever you're trying to like attack a problem and trying to brainstorm Solutions or what have you uh I I really like to remind the teams to think about misi uh because when you kind of think

about that and evaluate your set of solutions with that framework in mind I I think you tend to find that you've uh you'll you'll catch more potential Solutions and also you'll feel comfortable that you've been uh you know comprehensive in your solution development so anyway just a little thing for people that are earlier in their careers to not forget so let's make it a little bigger than a little thing so me see mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive is there an example of what that may look like and and or visualize for people to think about what this means in practice Yeah and uh I mean I'll give a really dumb example but it will make the point hopefully it's like okay you're like our profitability uh if or like our Revenue growth has slowed down is the problem that you're trying to solve and and so okay like you start with okay like what what does this mean like you've got Revenue per user has gone down or

customer has gone down or a number of customers have you know slowed down okay that's step one of the BC framework then it's like okay like where does the revenue come from what are all the various products uh that Revenue could be coming from has a change on any of them and then customers why have customers gone down is it new customer acquisition is it you know activation if customers that have signed up is it retention uh and just kind of breaking that problem so at each layer you've collectively exhausted all of the possible ways that this problem could have arrived uh and just having that framework whenever you approach every problem will prevent you from missing something important and also just more generally give you and others confidence that you're being comprehensive in your solution development got it so one way to think about this in this specific case is just like make a formula of all

of the variables that play into the question you're trying to answer yeah awesome

well sree with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round uh are you ready yeah let's do it what are two or three books they've recommended most to other people I tend to find most business books can be decks uh but one that I really like actually is uh it's never split the difference by Chris Voss I found it super helpful for it's a negotiation book financing level for negotiation but also for um uh from a lot of business decision making generally to be honest uh and life uh and and then another I I'm a big fan of sci-fi short stories so anything about that Chang or Ken Liu I highly recommend I love those both on the first one I'm actually in the process of listening to it on audio and I'm just every time I'm in a place where I can negotiate something I never remember anything that I've learned is there one thing that you've taken away from that book that's stuck with you like I use

this I think that the core of the book really is about listening behind the problem of negotiation and uh and what what is the person really asking for so it's an example of like you know if you're always trying to split things evenly you'll end up with one brown shoe one black shoe uh where neither of you are happy uh and so like what is the so rather than thinking about Batman and Zopa and all the other business school Frameworks on negotiation I think focus on like deep down what does this other person want and how can I change the conversation about that rather than the thing that we're you know arguing over awesome great next question what's your favorite recent movie or TV show I I mean obviously won the Oscar but I really enjoyed everything everywhere all at once I thought it was such a wonderful whole story and and it really I think it's one of those uh it's funny the movie can also be I think everything

because there are just so many different reads that you can get uh about that you know it's about family it's about immigration it's about queer love like there's there's a lot of really interesting themes uh explored via one movie what's a favorite interview question you'd like to ask I was gonna say oh I like to ask other people you like to ask what did you think I was gonna ask Oh I thought what was my favorite interview question that you've asked or others have asked okay both are acceptable answers um I I was gonna cheat on that one and say the one that you asked me right before because I don't think that kind of actually movies and uh and TV shows and people rarely ask about that uh interviews like this but favorite um interview question that I like to ask candidates actually is uh what's something that you're really bad at but you still do and why okay what do you look for in their answer

when you ask them yes I a lot of people actually struggle with that question and can't answer anything that they do that they're bad at um which is a little bit of a yellow flag which means that they're only used to doing things that they're successful at and they haven't cultivated interests that are not correlated to their own success uh at doing something and they haven't taken the time to do that and then folks like that are gonna run at the first sign of trouble uh and uh and then be like Oh I'm not successful at this so I'm going to move on and what I really want to see is people that show examples of things that they're not successful at that they do for other motivations and goals and interests uh and so if you tell me a compelling story like that it's usually a winning answers this week what is a favorite product or two that you've recently discovered that you love I already mentioned eight sleep

once in this call I love my eight sleep uh I'm a big fan and uh they're around customers as well and uh it's about uh that's been a great you know pandemic purchase uh so I guess maybe not as recent and uh and then maybe another one is like uh fellow um coffee uh they're they're kettles or I think just designed so beautifully I don't drink coffee I drink tea but I use my fellow Kettle uh for for tea and I think it's just a delightful product to use I got a fellow Kettle for my tea also and I found that the flow of the water was too slow and just like the just standing here pouring this cough pour over yeah yeah yeah so they do have a non-pour over Kettle which is what I have which makes it easier okay my mistake next question what is something relatively minor you've changed in your product development process that you found to have a big impact on your ability to execute yeah I mean I don't know if this is

minor or not but uh one of the things that you know on the growth side we used to have separate Sprint planning for the product team for the marketing teams and each team had their own planning cycles and uh and one of the things that we did is we brought them all together into one so like the life cycle marketers joined the product activation team Sprint cycles and so their projects and work are very tightly aligned uh and working the same pace and uh and systems as the rest of the product team and that said tremendous impact in our ability to work together final question ramp is all about helping people save money I'm curious if you have any pro tips on just saving money I mean it seems obvious and I think I feel like negotiations already been the theme of this lightning round but everything is is negotiable uh when it comes to contracts people think contracts are standardized for software and usually

not uh people are trying to sell you something they're trying to grow too they have their quotas to meet they have their uh goals to hit and so I mean rap obviously has a service for this so if you wanted to scale it use for apps but you can do this on your own right uh always try to negotiate uh be mindful of like quarter ends for sales people right uh and uh and so if you can push something out until near the end of the quarter you can ask for hey I'll sign it by the end of the month if you give me a 10 discount will often work uh so there's there's tips like that that you can do but remember you can always negotiate and then the second one is uh I would say is just higher slower I'm a big believer and and Jeff talks about this too uh in your other interview like hiring uh based on slope I think we'll we'll work well for you and like only hiring when people and teams are really scratched right uh I

think this will serve you well both on cost and on impact there'll be plenty of scope for the people that you hire and then and uh and as I said I'm a big believer in small teams accomplishing more like you know rap being like a fraction of the size of uh some of our competitors with similar orders of Revenue sure we've covered velocity growth hiring so many topics everything I was hoping we'd touch on two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you yeah I'm a big fan of you know the the fun place for this Festival of Twitter so I have a public Twitter account uh that you know you can DMV my DMs are open uh it's just my name it's three underscore about you um and uh and it turns out listeners can be useful uh honestly I think you know I I really enjoy reading like-minded folks uh and as I uh may have mentioned in other places uh ramp

is growing incredibly well and then we're constantly looking to to hire and I mean we're still hiring so uh if you know uh Best in Class growth and marketing folks uh that they can recommend uh the retire at ramp I don't care and I think the URL is ramp.com careers I just pulled it up that's amazing thank you all right treat well thank you again so much for being here and for sharing so much yeah of course thank you bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode