Ramp CEO Eric Glyman

Auren Hoffman (00:00.782)

Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Eric Glyman. Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a financial operations platform. Ramp is one of the fastest growing startups in history, reaching a hundred million ARR in just three years. Now Ramp is about five years old and they serve more than 25,000 customers, including Flex Capital, where I work and valued at over $7 billion. Prior to Ramp, Eric co-founded Paribus. Is that how pronounce it?

Which was a consumer app required by Capital One in 2016. So Eric, welcome to World of DaaS

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (00:30.25)

That's right.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (00:37.62)

Orrin, thanks so much for having me. I've been excited about this.

Auren Hoffman (00:41.74)

I'm really excited now. some ways, your ramps kind of the exception to the rule. There's been kind of very few fintech companies that have successfully disrupted the existing players that are out there. Why aren't there more ramps?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (00:58.262)

Well, first, thank you for the kind words and introduction. I hope this is interesting and useful to the people listening in today. I think some of it is around alignment. think a lot of Fintech companies and just financial services companies in general are just notoriously misaligned with their customers, and we can talk about that. And I think that the other is probably maybe based more in just the history of

and how differently it's behaved from the rest of technology. I'll start with the first, which is simple and maybe relates more to our history. When Ramp launched in 2020, we had this idea of it should be a card that is designed to help you spend less. And that was a really weird and different idea. We fell into it after selling our last company, you mentioned, the Capital One in 2016. When I was there, I...

learned a lot about turning data into savings, saving consumers money. It formed the backbone of Capital One shopping and that was great. But through a weird quirk, they didn't know where to put us. They put us in the credit card division. We got to see how the business worked, what made it very profitable. It was awesome. But we found there a lot of people thinking about what was good for the business, which was to get people to spend more money on their cards, Capital One earned more purchase volume.

And I had other colleagues thinking about how to get people to think the points are worth a lot, and some of them would devalue it. And as the resident savings people, we would ask customers, do you want points or cash back, something different, and what do you value? And if you really listen to customers, they would say, I just want more in my bank account. I would love to live a better financial life. And so we started

thinking about that and it kind of dawned on us, well if you really want to solve that problem there's an awesome way to do it which is help people not spend a hundred dollars on something they don't need in the first place. It's a hundred times better than getting one percent back. I got obsessed with this idea of what if there was a card in software that would help you do that.

Auren Hoffman (02:54.466)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:03.534)

And also like cancel these random recurring payments that you don't really need and, and, at least ask you about it or say, Hey, by the way, there's this new deal. You're paying 30 bucks a month for this thing, but there's this new deal on the website for 20 bucks a month for the same thing. Do want me to like change the plan for you?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (03:20.862)

all of this, right? It's like you booked a hotel and the next week it goes on sale or the price goes down. Could you cancel and rebook it? All these sorts of, there's all these different ways. You're on a monthly plan, you could be on annual. But when you think about the history of payments, unless you were a bank, you couldn't move money. And so it's been the same people who have just owned the industry for 50 years. Capital One is an exception, but most of these banks, their founders were top hats.

Auren Hoffman (03:29.207)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (03:50.038)

And quite literally, it's not a joke. And so if you have 20 % of a market, 40 % of the market, what incentive do you have to actually help people spend less? And so some of, think, what separated us from both the traditionals and even the new players that have entered the space was we didn't start this with an idea of this, would sell the same product in different way. The problem we wanted to solve is not how do you give

Auren Hoffman (03:52.429)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (04:18.322)

in people's hands, but how do you help businesses run leaner? How do you help them spend less? And so I think some of it was a different focus. I think that the other, you know, somebody said to me recently, I think maybe you guys are a productivity company masquerading as a fintech. And I thought that was charming, but it was sort of this interesting thing where if you think about most of the history of technology,

there are these great companies that are dramatically better and they gobble up a lot of market share. And as the world went from no phones to flip phones to iPhones, credit cards never changed, bank accounts never really changed. And kind of the world of money was the world of banks and then software people could build aftermarket banks. And the results was that for most people to buy one cup of coffee, subscription to software, you need two different tools to buy it. And so I think that the other thing that we did that was different was

we try to excel both at having great payment products, but we're focused on is workflow automation. How do you help, not just have an easier expense report, but just a zero touch expense report. not just easier to do books, but books that keep themselves money that find its way to the highest yield. And I think that over time it's gone from historically. One card has this point program. One card is this cash back. They're kind of variations on a theme to I'm not trying to sell,

you know, a different car to someone, we're trying to make companies more profitable. We're trying to automate processes and it's very different than a lot of what else is in market. I think the differentiation has been useful.

Auren Hoffman (05:58.892)

It's hard to just align incentives with the customer. you think like a traditional bank, let's say it's got a checking account and a savings account and the savings account is relatively high yield, let's say the checking account is zero yield. you know, they make it very, they, they want you to have as much money in the checking account as possible because they make money on it and as little money as the savings account. So they make it actually quite hard and you can't really pull money from your savings account. can't do things and

It doesn't auto balance and it doesn't do these other types of things. You can't wire from your savings account, right? They do all these things just to make it, to, so they can earn that extra VIG on that transaction there. And that's obviously all bad for the customer. The customer has to remember, I got to log in every week and rebalance or redo something. and of course they're going to forget and you know, all, all this other stuff, but

You can understand the incentive of why the bank does that because they might make another hundred grand a year off of a customer or 10 grand a year off a customer by just making it hard for them to move money.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (07:05.174)

100 % and I can understand, like I feel like people have gotten away with it for a long time, right?

Auren Hoffman (07:13.974)

Yeah. I mean, it is, it's very bad behavior, but every bank does it. I mean, even some of the new banks, you know, do it.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (07:23.72)

Yeah, and it's, I identify with what you're saying because we, you know, today, like we don't store money, but as part of a risk and underwriting processes, we're linked to, you know, $100 billion plus of assets. And I can tell you, it's what you're saying is an anecdotal. It is done at very large scale. These banks are extremely profitable. And I think it's fine.

They've been able to make it work for a long time in a world in which their only competitors are banks who've had the money for a long time, the market share, and no new entrants. But I think that will change. And maybe us, maybe someone else, we want to compete and we want the best product to win. I think that, I'll put it this way, I think a lot of businesses over time are

out of what is the central question and what's the central mission of the business. And at the start of Ramp, we wanted to be pretty intentional of we're not in the business of slinging cards, we're not in the business of selling bill payment software, whatever may be. Our mission is to help companies spend less money and spend less time. And if you ask where are businesses spending money that they don't need to, where are companies spending time they don't need to be?

You ask different questions, it will lead you to different answers and it will lead you down a different product set. And I think in some sense, I think that by starting by trying to align our incentives with customers, actually the business model that gets better, the more money and time we save you, the more we think and hope and believe customers will want to use Ramp, the more we grow, the more efficient they become and the more enduring of the business they build. And I think that difference is part of...

Actually, I don't think it's much more complicated than that of why Ramp has become, you know, we think the fastest growing fintech in history, but we hope and believe one of the, you know, faster growing companies in history is just trying to bring the simple approach, actually aligning incentives with customers and going from there.

Auren Hoffman (09:36.942)

the UI side in the, in the beta C fintech, there are a lot of, a lot of the new fintech players are, have quite a good UI. you know, you think of Robinhood and chime and, know, some of these other guys have quite a good UI. on the B2B side, you know, it's understandable that like the legacy players don't have a great UI. You wouldn't really expect chase or somebody like that, bank of America to have a good UI, but even some of the.

Newer companies, if you go to bill.com, like the UI is just really lacking. if you go to, are some of these B2B players still like, they're just still having grass. do they, is is UI not as important or is it just cause like there's APIs in the background and people don't use the UI as much or why is the UI just not there for most of these players?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (10:27.638)

No, you're totally right. And I always found this interesting because our first ramp is our second company. The first one was a consumer app as well. And so we fell into this and wondered, you know, these people go home and they buy Apple products and they wear Nike shoes and they're using Robin Hood and Instagram. Like why can't the products that people are using for hours a day, why aren't they more special? Why aren't they beautiful? And truly, I actually don't think there's a good

Auren Hoffman (10:43.33)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:55.916)

And not just beautiful, like it takes like 15 clicks to do something. It's a little bit buggy. has all these issues. you know, it's someone it's like, if you go to like, if you go to the branch of a bank, it's beautiful. It's like gorgeous. And the UI of the branch is great. Like it's spotless and the people are great, you know, but if you, but it's like,

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (11:13.908)

This is good. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:16.962)

But if you go online, it's like the equivalent of like showing up in the branch and there's like dirt on the floor and there's rats running around and stuff, right?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (11:24.118)

Yeah. It's a well, so let's I actually think this is a deceivingly good question in a lot of ways. So first, I believe some of this has to do with incentives in the business and some of it has to do with like who is designing this? What are the constructs of companies?

When were they made? And who's there? So first on incentives, mean one of the classic problems in B2B software is the person you're selling to isn't necessarily the user. You know, who's the buyer is the user. And I think it's been made a lot worse in the office of the CFO in the category of all this because you know, not only do you have point solutions where you know, classically, you know, the software that dictated the rules of

of what the card would do versus the expense app versus the bill payment were all different. So they didn't connect. We're messy. But I think what made a lot, just a lot of enterprise software is just that. The person they're selling to wants control, wants to make things harder. And you see kind of this backward sort of thinking. so, you know, I think if you're often dealing with like the CFO and you're trying to convince them, hey,

My software is cheaper at times that will work. They'll design kind of cheaper cruddy or software and you can't expect the outcome. think that we've You know, and by the way even too early on like we had to say no to a of businesses that wanted You know

Auren Hoffman (13:07.21)

access control or some other type of thing.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (13:10.166)

Or just integrate with this other tool already. I don't want to take some chances. It's kind of a conservative mindset. So it's easier if you're short-term focused. It's easier to do the easier thing. You get kind of credit for your outcomes. I think the other is

Auren Hoffman (13:13.464)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (13:22.722)

By the way, it's a good point because like the software that is most like the biggest software that sold to the CFO is the GL, right? And that is the least good software I've ever seen in my entire life. Like it's so hard to use and maybe it's intentionally hard. I'm not sure. Like if you ever try to use Workday, it's just like, it's like, it's an atrocious experience for, for anybody.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (13:45.718)

It's this weird thing of these systems of operations and systems of record, and they're kind of point solutions. Like an ERP is, let's say you have a 500 person company. You might have seen it because you're building the company, but my guess is probably like five people have seen what your accounting software looked like. Maybe two have seen your bank account. Maybe eight have seen what bill.com looks like. And so it's like not really designed for use. It's designed for like record keeping and all that.

RAM is very different in the 500 person company. mean, many you'll have 500 people using it. Maybe you'll have like three, 400. I think some of that is an outcome of focusing on productivity. How do you people spend less time? We designed for that, but some of it actually has to do with like who is the software being designed for? And our view was a lot of the problem was the people making money decisions, the CFO controllers, you know, power and needed control, but lacked

context, employees who had the context maybe lacked a whole view and you need something like ramp, which could be a mesh effectively where you don't advocate control. You can have control of every individual car, but you make it experience easier. Maybe to back up though, to the other point, when I think about payments companies in general, I think you and I have kind of lived in a world where you'd like the fast moving tech companies, the move

fast and break things, know, Facebook's of the world, the Amazons, the Microsoft's, all of it that like pride on really fast development. When I think about the payments world in general, a lot of the great companies, American Express, unbelievable brand, one of the best marketing organizations I think on the planet, Chase, unbelievable distribution, Capital One, at risk assessments. They have things that they're great at.

But they really struggle a lot with maybe the sphere of asymmetric downside, asymmetric risk, and as a result have designed lots of processes internally to make sure that you have everyone sign off for reviews, the whole committee, a legal team reviews it, regulatory teams reviews it, finance teams. And so shipping speeds are a lot slower as well. And so when I think about like

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (16:13.514)

bank branches, you don't really carry the same regulatory risk. It's kind of control, it's just how an office looks. It's like the form factor. It's not how it functions. It's not how it feels. And so it doesn't go through as many committees. It's not as complex to design it. You don't need as many people involved and it can't go wrong in many different kinds of ways. It's contained. And I think that a lot of the orgs moving money and banks struggle with kind of

separations, precisions about who has access controls to what to design an effective building process.

Auren Hoffman (16:47.726)

I remember a few years ago, we had a little bit of a decentralized buying at our company and we had six different people that had like a yearly LinkedIn subscription for like a thousand dollars each. And then we found out that you could get like 10 seats for $5,000. So we could save a thousand dollars and get more seats. Obviously that was a good thing, but like, I wish we would have known about that beforehand.

And I would think you guys could like tell us, I'd imagine you would have the ability to not just see what you're spending, but somehow crawl and understand the different deals or understand what other people are doing. is that kind of like the vision of what you want to do?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (17:33.398)

It is. And after I'm going to send you a link to our vendor portal inside on the dashboard, you'll find price intelligence, which is a pretty interesting feature. And effectively what we do is we aggregate, you know, de-identified anonymized data about top SaaS vendors. And we'll pull that from receipts, invoices, MSAs,

And so just as Zillow did for consumers, you can know what your house may be worth. TrueCar did for car buying, we want to do for B2B SaaS. And so the next time you have a renewal, you actually can go into ramp today and see here's prices by product line, by if you're doing monthly versus annual. And if you're buying one seat, 10 seat, 100, 1000, 10,000 seats, how that distribution kind of looks. But I think that you're right.

But part of why, maybe to back into, we had this vision of we wanted to help businesses spend less money. And the question is, where could you get enough data that would allow people to see that? We felt that if you were both executing the transaction and you collected the receipts, the invoices, not only could you facilitate the transactions, smooth out the workflows, but for companies that you serve, your customers, you could show them

where they fit. So price intelligence is something we do and we're investing a lot into. The other is seed intelligence, where you don't necessarily need to know how else are other companies doing, but sometimes as companies get bigger, they just become more complicated. And so maybe, let's say you did that deal and you pay for 10 seeds. You can link up your Google account or Okta if you use that.

And we can show single sign-on data to say, you you're paying for 10 seats, six people logged in. Do you still want to pay for all 10 or next time do you want to go negotiate for lower? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:33.357)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. That's a great, cause, cause getting all that information takes a lot of time for someone to go through. And it might not be worth the time right now to save a thousand dollars, but if you could just give it to them, then that, that, that is a, that's a huge, huge, benefit. Now, what thing like one of things that I really like about the position you're in is you have all this data about spending and what's going on.

What are some interesting patterns or trends you're seeing in corporate spending that might surprise us?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (20:10.262)

for sure. I think, first of all, we try to put out reports really regularly. These kind of culminate into like, you know, 30 to 60 page, depending on the reports. So you can see for small, medium and large size businesses, what's happening, how is that changing? And the next one is going to be out in about a month's time, so called early November. I think probably one that we get asked about a lot that's interesting is like,

What's this deal with AI? There's been unbelievable amounts of investment going in. Companies are.

Auren Hoffman (20:42.562)

Yeah, people spending on OpenAI, are they spending on other types of vendors? What's happening there?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (20:48.886)

Yep. Maybe I'll... Let's start there on OpenAI. So think classically, if you looked at the data, there was one name that mattered and it was OpenAI. One of the things that came out in the most recent quarterly report was Anthropic. In Q1, they were about 4 % of that big pie, pretty small. Q2, 17%. Wild.

Auren Hoffman (21:15.249)

my gosh. And I assume the pie is also growing, so this is pretty impressive. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (21:19.782)

Absolutely. It is very impressive. And I think a lot of this came from part of why the industry is so competitive, which is with one line of code, you can switch where the network call goes. can call this line, you know.

Auren Hoffman (21:32.066)

Yeah, that's right. Right. So if you have an API and entropic is slightly cheaper, slightly better, you might as well, or you might as well just try it for 30 % of your things and see how it's, how's it going.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (21:45.066)

Yep. And so that's, that is like a big one of like, there is a real reason for why these vendors are so hotly competitive, which is that traffic is switching, things are moving. So it's very active and we'll have, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (22:00.13)

Got it. And they get from four to 17. They could go back to four if someone else is slightly better, right? It's very, very competitive. It's very easy to switch. There's no real lock in right now.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (22:10.87)

100%. And that's like a pretty important thing for AI vendors in general to be thinking about as the space is moving. I think just on AI for a minute, we can move to other kind of categories. It's becoming much stickier. I think if you were to look at the retention data of merchants, if you were to go and look in, call it a year ago, two years ago, for businesses that tried out an AI vendor,

only 40 % of them would still be paying that same vendor a year later, so from July 22 to July 23. From July 23 to...

Auren Hoffman (22:46.988)

Yep. Well, by the way, chat, chat, GPT came out in November, kind of 22, which is, you know, we're taping this in October 24th. So still less than two years ago. So you're, really talking about pre chat GPT before that kind of like cognitive revolution came in everyone's head.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (23:04.398)

Exactly. And you nailed it. The products are getting better and the desire to use these things are getting stronger. So if you look at that same, all AI vendors broadly, they jump from 40 % retention to 67 % retention and every single one of these cohort curves is getting a lot stronger. So these products are getting stickier. Things are moving from card to invoices. And so people are signing long-term contracts. So I think...

think the broader point is they're going from things that people are testing to actually deeply operational. And you can see a lot of interesting things too. I think if you look more broadly, probably the biggest story that we've seen in B2B payments for this year has just been the return to growth, the spend in at-

Auren Hoffman (23:54.48)

really, so we're now spending again, like we're not cutting as much and not just on software, but on other types of things, travel, other things.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (24:05.27)

Yes, I think for a long time, businesses, especially 2022, 2023, dealt immediately with the rising cost of capital and had to, know, capital markets were fairly closed and you had to go lean. But now as rates are coming back down and just valuations are increasingly tied to what will, how much profit will this business do in 10 years, 20 years from now.

The biggest driver of that is growth. And so you see spend on advertising coming up very significantly. Some of that is cost of ads going up too. It's not just people are growing. But I think for business it can. That's heavy.

Auren Hoffman (24:38.958)

Okay, interesting. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (24:48.278)

Interesting. Now I feel like your data also be really good at like, just mentioned this anthropic data. Like if we were an investor, it would be really great to have access to this type of data to understand like what is, you know, we, we would might be know something before the public might know it and either we could invest in public companies together and get an edge or we can invest in private companies like anthropic together. Like should.

Should you and I just start like a hedge fund or a venture capital fund to go do this? Like, could you trade on your data? I imagine you can make a lot of money by doing that.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (25:19.222)

You

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (25:26.582)

It's a good question. And I think you are probably right. What would I say? I do think that the primary thing at the end of the day that Ramp is trying to deliver, saving time, saving money, alignment, I think the core underlying principle out of this is trust. Our customers need to trust us too. Cards need always work.

For automating accounting, need to allow them to operate more efficiently. And last, if we're saving money and time, I do think probably the core thing that we need to do as a business is make sure we are always doing right. It's in the interest of people. so I can't say I've thought about it too actively, but I agree with you. I think the data itself is very interesting, and that's part of why we try to once a quarter regularly sue everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (26:17.39)

Because there might be even like a new API company or something. And it goes from like zero in September to something fairly significant that you can see in October or November. It's really going off the charts. Maybe the typical venture capital firm may not know that. And this might be a very good time to jump in there.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (26:41.046)

I I love the idea of using data to help customers. I think that is awesome. And the same way of taking this data and saying, here's where you are, here's where the other customers are getting charging. Don't get charged more because some salesperson thinks they have you. And they give you a crazy, again, interesting rate. But I think you're totally right. Maybe there's something to do if businesses can...

Auren Hoffman (26:57.346)

Yep, yeah, yep.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (27:10.238)

you know, share and get something, know, probably work some deeper thought.

Auren Hoffman (27:16.524)

Yeah, you can give you can give a percentage of the carry to your all your customers. What now? Visa. I love these. love reading about these. I love reading about the history of these. It's one of my favorite businesses to study. Like what have you learned from them?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (27:33.546)

They are such, I think that their corporate structure resembles the Boy Scouts of America or the Constitution more than it does other corporates. What a fascinating, weird business. Before starting, just spent weeks reading everything I could about the history of Bank of America, which led to Bank of AmeriCard, which...

Auren Hoffman (27:56.244)

Okay. Did you read the book? piece of the action? Yeah. That's one of my favorite books. It's so, it's so good. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (27:59.222)

piece of the action.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (28:04.916)

That one's amazing. mean, I think some of the others are a little crazy, like the chaotic organization from Dehawk was a little wild. Visa, power of an idea. It's a really unusual history. And I actually think for anyone who's deeply sitting business, you should pay attention to it. And you know this incredibly well, because it so doesn't resemble other corporate structures. It is trying to be designed.

Auren Hoffman (28:10.051)

yeah, de-hoc, yeah, yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (28:34.076)

such that even if certain players were acting totally in their incentives and trying to break it apart, it kind of gets self-reinforcing about it. What I would say about them that they get right, think sometimes people ask like, Ramp, so when are you going to go and disintermediate this network forever? I sell people like actually Visa is an incredible partner. They're kind of amazing and they bring

I think part of why they've gotten as large as they have is that for basically almost all players, I think that they actually make everyone in the ecosystems business a lot more valuable. And I think there was weird principles that go into it, would be my honest thought about them. But how do you think about it, Arun?

Auren Hoffman (29:24.59)

I mean, they are, they are so profitable that they actually have like a whole unit internally trying to figure out to just spend money because if they were, if they were as profitable as they would just normally be for, if you were running the business efficiently, like the government would jump in and like shut them down or something. So they have like this whole side hustle of just trying to figure out how to waste money, how to throw money at things, how to go do things with the money.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (29:28.715)

Yes.

Auren Hoffman (29:54.06)

So that even there, profit margins are still extraordinary.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (29:59.19)

It is extremely profitable. I wonder if they would describe it the same way, I, look, what would I say? mean, it's definitely self-evident. It's one of the most profitable business models on the planet. I do think what, I think is probably interesting to me about them is probably the incentive thing.

which is in some sense, like people could choose not to accept Visa or banks could choose not to issue with Visa cards and yet everyone kind of does. And I think that people talk, like it's thrown around a lot of, if you should study incentives, why do people do what they do? How do you motivate people? And maybe they got lucky, but I don't think it was just that. I think that company has studied incentives for all parties involved.

much more closely than I think many people have and I think there's a lot to learn from them. But I know there's a lot of attention on them now, especially the last few weeks.

Auren Hoffman (31:01.836)

Yeah, for sure. Now you recently tweeted, you said that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, but maybe they should. And how do we kind of create cultures to be more bold to do those things?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (31:17.162)

I mean, my gosh. mean, so first, I, I mean, it's very obvious when you're a startup. Like, you're a few people, you get a sheet of paper issued by Delaware, and you're a company, and you have this really arrogant proposition of you're gonna go and start a company that's worth millions, billions of dollars, very few companies ever have, and yours.

sitting from a couch, you're going to go and do that. You can't do it just, you know, through taking kind of the average out, you know, buying things at an average price and getting an average outcome. You need to find mispricings in the market. And that could be you find people who are way more talented and capable than maybe people understand. Or it could be you work with another technology partner, you pick a vendor.

that is on a really steep trajectory. Maybe their prices are here today, but they're getting better really, really fast and they're going to build things specifically useful for you that will give you the power of a bunch of people building for you. And in our case early on, we realized that working with certain partners, Marketa and Stripe were early ones, but it varied on different aspects where you could pay a little bit for a network call and effectively have hundreds of engineers building just exactly what you need for your business.

And so in some sense, it's very obvious and people lose sight of it as businesses get bigger. Because the question is not how do you create really outsized value, it's how do you protect some of the value that you have. And I think that you need, I think it needs to come, some of it's maybe it's incentive structures or people paid for just things they do this year versus outcomes in 10 years from now. think there's companies thinking about 10 year best schedules out of the money options the way.

you know, some executive or compensated, you regular employees should have too. But I think that the other is like, you have to, like, I don't know that the essay was particularly clear about the meaning of like the founder mode essay, but I think that you actually need to, from time to time, like, be really clear and direct about these things. But if you have different and controversial views, to talk about it and show examples and maybe to say, look, like we went too standard, we're going too slow and like,

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (33:35.988)

we are going to make a change or this team, it didn't work and let a team go. And I think it's never fun, but I think that if you want to have different than average outcomes, you can't behave in an average way. And that's kind of roughly how I think about it, but I actually think it's just true. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:53.486)

And if you think of like buying vendors, like it's certainly a lot easier to fire a vendor than it is to fire an employee. And nowadays most companies have more vendors than they do employees. it's in, they're, and that ratio is going up.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (34:09.982)

You know what? I used to think that and then, you know, I was at a meeting last week with a company and they were telling me that they bought the software in 2012 and they are still paying to implement it. Millions of dollars every year. They would like, it's an ERP. They can't fire them. You know, there's another procurement tool. I don't know about that. I'm teasing. it's.

Auren Hoffman (34:23.165)

my gosh. Jeez. Okay. I guess I'm wrong. Yeah. You mentioned, I mean, you mentioned two vendors that in the kind of B2B payments world that I really admire, Marketta and Stripe. were investors in Marketta. I wish we were investors in Stripe. What have you learned from those two companies? Because both of those companies are really amazing.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (34:39.318)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (34:54.07)

my gosh. mean, both have been phenomenal partners. I mean, I think, what would I say on each? So first, think Stripe, in many ways, they were like the inspiration in a lot of our early hiring practices. I remember pretty distinctly, was 2017, 18, and if you were to talk to any up and coming,

If you're an upcoming engineer and you just want to say, I want to work at the best company, an engineering driven company in payments, where should I go? Everyone said, you got to go to Stripe. No question, right? And I think they figured out, I mean, someone maybe call it like Mystique or whatever, it was this sense of talent density of if you have the first 10 people be really excellent.

Auren Hoffman (35:32.91)

100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (35:49.172)

truly world-class, maybe go more generous on equity, but like really special.

Auren Hoffman (35:52.066)

I mean, just you have to, they have a bit of an unfair advantage because their two founders are just like off the charts. Amazing. most, most of us are mere murdles compared to the Carlson brothers. So it's a little, it's kind of unfair that they have these two amazing founders.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (36:09.366)

It's true. They are great, maybe to push a bit, Greg Brockman's not a Colson, but that guy's amazing. And he was their CTO for a long time, like Locky Groom. If you were on LinkedIn and Stripe was 30 people, each person was almost more interesting than the next.

Auren Hoffman (36:21.602)

That's true. Good point. Yeah, that's a good point. A really good point. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (36:36.446)

You know, it's like the funny thing about companies that are doing a billion dollars a year in revenue. They were doing a hundred million first, then 10 million before that, and a million before that. They kind of reverse engineered it. They actually just really were obsessive about finding great people. So that if you think about it from the candidate's perspective, every time you pull up that LinkedIn page, you see who else is there. It's just all really impressive. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (36:59.884)

Yeah, you want to work with those people. Yeah. Even today, like when I look at like the average Stripe resume, even though they have probably over a thousand people today, it's really impressive. Like the people who work there are very talented.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (37:13.302)

And that's it. think that they really tried to internalize the A-Players, higher-air players, but there's a reflexive property to it, which is if you get talent density right at the beginning, and you actually just obsess over it, a lot of the rest takes care of itself, and it makes it easier to keep quality high as you're scaling. And so I think there's a lot of lessons in just how to find great talent.

and build that brand around that, that we learned from them.

Auren Hoffman (37:45.72)

What are my hacks in looking at companies, especially B2B companies, is looking at their docs and seeing the UI of the docs and the UI of the Stripe API docs are about as good as you could ever imagine. They've really thought it that through in a way where they clearly care about the customer.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (38:03.766)

Totally.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (38:10.618)

totally. I think, I mean, this is maybe to the point about B2B products earlier. You can make certain things beautiful. And it just says a lot about the rest of the company. if you, their docs are pristine, know, what, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (38:26.83)

Yeah, and just like, it's easy to find the thing, it's easy to try it out, you can write a test right there, you know, all those things.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (38:34.548)

all of it. And I actually think that there's a lot of alpha for anyone building in B2B of just like little tiny experiences, getting them just right. It just speaks volumes and we've tried to build a lot of that even to ramp. But maybe to go to Marketta, because I actually think there's a lot of really fascinating lessons there too. mean, there were a lot of interesting things that they did. I mean, they started as a gift card.

company, almost marketplace API for it. And then it turned out, I mean, they basically invented this concept. Some people forget it, this idea of just in time funding, but it allowed you to synthetically like fill up a prep, like a card during the three seconds between, know, someone swipes your card to approve or deny it. And that effectively allowed us to later build everything that we did, like expense policies that could be infused into your card.

but they were actually one of the very key players that, it's core infrastructure that set the stage for like the revolution in fintech that happened. I actually think sometimes what people underestimate about like, know, Stripe had like the glow and the luster, but Marketta, I can tell you in the very early days,

and still to this day continues to be an outstanding customer because Ramp is an important partner with theirs. I think whether Ramp does well or not, I think Stripe cares, they're fine. think they will be unbelievably great and outstanding no matter what. I think Marquetta will find a way through, but if we do well together, we're going to build each other's businesses at the same time. And I think sometimes this is related to the IBM point.

I think people sometimes undervalue businesses that are maybe in second or third place or still on their way and smaller companies. And the difference is that if they are heavily incentivized or if we do great work and build something great together and they make ramps successful, they become very successful.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (40:52.566)

I remember early in my career, I don't know if it's true or not, the story about the Hollywood agent where he's up against like six other people trying to convince like this star in Hollywood why she shouldn't go with the big agency or whatever. And he said, look, I don't have the, I'm not part of this big firm, I don't have 10 other stars, I'm not gonna get all the looks from the directors, but I promise you, if you pick me, I'm gonna go to sleep thinking about you, I'm gonna wake up obsessing over how do I make you the biggest star ever, and if you do, like.

I'm going to be loyal because you made my career and go do that. I think it's actually related to, you're taking a bet on the right vendors who really are invested in your success can be transformative to both. And so not only do I think Marquette has been deeply innovative, but I think that they, in my interactions with them, and I'm not just trying to be nice, think the Colson's are trying to preserve this, that's but I think that they especially embody the like,

they want to see you succeed and work with you. so it's something I've seen them do very well and I think is probably a pitch to any company deciding between the big known brand or the unknown. If the unknown has the right things, they're on the right slope and incentives are in line, think about them more than you would.

Auren Hoffman (42:08.462)

Possibly the best ad campaign of all time was the Avis were number two ad campaign. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, that's so compelling. and it just kind of, it makes sense. Like it intuitively makes sense that, you know, someone who's going to want your business more, they're just going to go that extra mile for you. rather than going for like the big, you know, the big brand or somebody, you know, somebody who might not care about you that much, like the big Hollywood agency, as you, as you mentioned.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (42:14.078)

We work harder.

Auren Hoffman (42:37.324)

What now one of the things I mean, you guys have scaled a lot in terms of like having to hire lots of people. how do you keep that quality high? Like what are some of the things that you do that maybe other companies haven't figured out?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (42:52.114)

gosh. there are some things that make hiring at Ramp like pretty weird in certain sense. the biggest, might be, are, not might be, I'm sure there are people who are much better at hiring than me. I think I've had mixed success at hiring, you know, like the person who's been there done that, you know, executive and it's really hard. And I think,

Auren Hoffman (43:15.064)

Hard to hire execs. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (43:19.848)

Early on, we just said we're not the best in the world at it. Maybe there's less alpha there. It's all priced in already at that point. And we're not so good at it. So instead, we're going to try to hire the top of the class at MIT as a freshman for their summer internship when no one else is competing to give them an internship. Or we're going to go and try to convince someone to drop out. Or we're going to go look at who's winning.

Auren Hoffman (43:42.046)

huh.

Auren Hoffman (43:48.194)

This is like the moneyballish approach or something.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (43:51.836)

Exactly. And you'll see this too. mean, it's both in how we hire and how we've advertised, like Neil Shipley, who was the low amateur of the year at the US Open golf tournament and, you know, Nationals and all that, sponsored by Ramp. And it turned out like did great. So we try to think about kind of the moneyball approach for hiring, for how we go to market, but just try to find more efficient.

outcomes and so we, I would say obsess over that in a way where very few companies do. I think Google did, I think Facebook did, I think Stripe did, but you know compete in a spot where you can uniquely. I think next with engineering we actually don't really hire managers. Sometimes it's harder right in getting the right person in mid-senior kind of levels but you know we try to find great people and stretch and promote from within.

I think that goes a lot. you know, last, and this was one of the better lessons I think I picked up at Capital One. I remember on day one I got there and I was just like shocked as like a kind of millennial where I meet people and say, hi, I'm Sarah. I've been with Capital One for 12 years. Hi, I'm Tom. I've been with Capital One for 22 years. And like my brain was broken because, you know, I didn't...

Auren Hoffman (45:12.248)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (45:17.66)

This was like mid 2010 Silicon Valley was like my experience where people, you know, staying at a company for a long time was a year and a half. And I was trying to like, how did, how did they do this? Like what was going on? And it turned out that they didn't just talk about what does the company need and how are we going to get that done? That was there. Well, some teams, a lot of others less. But they, they actually asked people of like, you know,

What do you want out of life? What are your goals and are we moving towards it? They didn't just have a performance, they had development conversations with people. And it was kind

Auren Hoffman (45:56.43)

How did they get that? Like I live a few miles from Capital One headquarters and I, so I meet a lot of people that work at Capital One. And as you've met so many people have been there like over 20 years and they like it and they talk great about their employer and like, but, but I never could, I haven't, having never worked there, I never could figure out what they do. Like, did they, how did they do that? Like what's the secret?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (46:23.03)

I think it relates to...

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (46:28.726)

this truth at some level of to some extent, everyone is kind of the hero of their own story. You know, everyone is living their own life. And if I think at Capital One, they did a very good job in most teams of making you feel, actually encouraging managers to ask like, what do you want? Where do you want to go in five to 10, you know, 15 years?

Auren Hoffman (46:54.862)

So you're just caring. You're saying like, literally they care, you know, and they express it. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (46:58.454)

They actually, and they follow through. In some teams it would be like once a month, or it would be once a quarter, where it's like we're not gonna talk about work, we're not gonna talk about like, here you said at the start of the year and where you wanna go over the coming years, are we getting closer to that? And it sounds so simple, but it's really, it's true. I think if you kind of do both, you find great people and you coach and you figure out what's great for the company, good for them, and you bring that in.

Auren Hoffman (47:07.97)

Wow. Yeah.

It's amazing.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (47:27.414)

think it can help in a lot of areas that a lot of companies struggle with.

Auren Hoffman (47:32.366)

Now we talked about like managing vendors, hiring vendors, bringing in vendors. There are thousands of books and gazillion business school courses about managing people and hiring people. But there are no good ones that I know of at least about how to select a vendor, how to manage the vendor, how to grow those vendors, how to build those partnerships, how to manage all that type of thing.

What do you do to infuse that or to test for that?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (48:12.002)

Yeah, for sure. Hold on here. Let me see. I feel like my mic, did my mic just switch to the sound quality? Or is it all normally? Cool. Okay. So sorry about that. So what do we do on it? So first...

Auren Hoffman (48:20.81)

No, it's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (48:31.574)

I actually think it's weirdly important now in a way that it's not just a fun thing to talk about on a podcast. We're kind of in a world where computers can kind of think, actually. software can increase, it can, right? And it can do kind of knowledge work. so I'm not seeing we're at a spot today where you can hire

Auren Hoffman (48:49.144)

Totally can. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (48:59.912)

a hundred knowledge workers, but it's not a totally crazy thought to think that that might be plausible in the coming, depending on you ask months or years. so training this, I think is particularly important. And so first, I think being clear on like, what is the problem you want to solve?

now and what is the shape of the problem going to look like over time is important. think a lot of time people say like the problem is to look like this and don't play it forward. I think with employees you kind of remember that you can teach them things. I think with systems like the data that goes into it, how it connects and also like the shipping speed of a company is like pretty real. Often when we're looking for vendors one of the things that we look at is like is the ties riding? Are they investing a lot or do they just have a bunch of layoffs? they not investing?

Auren Hoffman (49:56.824)

Yeah. So basically velocity of new features and things like that. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (50:01.206)

right, velocity of new features. What is the right central organizing point of data? Is this a system of record or action? How do things connect? So we'll look at integration points for the task at hand. And then I think if you think about some of the killer attributes of large language models where things were going just AI per second mode, we talk about general vendors, often the more data it has,

the more useful it can be, the more context about what you want it to do, it's better at prediction. And so in some sense, sort of just thinking about how much is going to the training of that, the velocity, the improvement of that model and how incorporated is it to the right data models. Like one of the advantages we're trying to bring to all of our customers is, your car data, bill payment data, procurement data, travel data, bank data, it won't exist in different places. It's kind of in one. And so if you want to ask globally how to cut costs,

how to automate more times, it's a lot easier because it's plugged into more sources of data. We have more revealed preferences about how your company operates and how to make it operate more efficiently. And so you want to think about that for the jobs to be done for the software suites that you're using would be my thought about it. And then other things too, there's this question of build versus buy.

versus kind of like partner with the nature of the relationship. I think in some sense, if you model out the unit economics, how your business works, there are some deals where you can pay a small amount and to build it and maintain it, your cost would be this versus a regular network call is gonna kind of scale incrementally with the number of units. And so you wanna think about like, what are the scaling laws of the product that you're buying? And ideally, as your business scales, the cost goes down, the value.

goes up, it's connected to the right data, that kind of it. It gets very nuanced, but we just try to break down the first principles, like these types of questions to get into it.

Auren Hoffman (52:05.902)

Now a few personal questions. You speak fluent Mandarin, you lived in China for a couple of years. How has that shaped your worldview?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (52:13.772)

Yeah, super fun. I lived there mostly 2009 through, call it 13, but kind of went back every year through the pandemic. And I just never seen a place get developed so quickly. Like I remember one time, was six, three months between trips.

where I left my stuff at a friend's apartment and came back to the US and I went there three months later and I couldn't find the apartment. I was in a taxi cab circling around. like, know this place was here and it turned out they had built an entire section of high rises in the three months and rerouted. It's like that's the level of development. And I think the way it affected me was I compare that to friends who

Auren Hoffman (52:59.054)

Crazy.

Auren Hoffman (53:03.374)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (53:10.688)

Europe cities like Boston where like that place

Auren Hoffman (53:14.114)

Yeah, the big dig took 20 years or something. Yeah, probably. Yeah, right. You're probably right. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (53:17.76)

I don't know. It's terrifying, right? There's the world and you live in it, versus in China, it is obvious the world is getting built and you can play a part in building it. I think it weirdly pushed on my start-up, just inclination of let's try to build stuff. I didn't feel like it was so impossible. I the other thing too, I remember

Auren Hoffman (53:30.253)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (53:47.106)

So I direct enrolled in Peking University in a bunch of classes. I took accounting, I some economics, I took different classes with students ultimately going there for college, which was amazing. And there was one story that kind of changed my view about studying businesses, where we effectively were assigned...

you know, a research report where you have a week, you need to write this report on a company. think that the assignment was study why Wegmans is a successful grocer. and you have to write a, it was cool. I was like, fine. All right. it's not, we've never been to one and, I had to write a 4,000 character essay, turned in next week. And that's a lot for someone who, didn't write that well yet. And so I was like working really hard on it. And the day before it was due, I remember asking a friend.

Auren Hoffman (54:22.057)

waggmins, okay. Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (54:40.578)

You know, hey, how's your project going? Do feel kind of ready for the due date? He's made conversation with her. says, I haven't started it yet. And I said, well, this is a long essay. Like you haven't started it and it's due tomorrow morning. And she said, yeah, I was going to go on buy due later and just kind of look at the company's history. What made it successful and just turn it in. said, aren't you worried about plagiarism? It sounds like you're kind of plagiarizing. And she looked at me and said, well,

Well, no, people know why that company was successful. If I were to write it, I would get it wrong.

Auren Hoffman (55:19.783)

interesting. So there's a whole different philosophy on it.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (55:24.68)

It's, think that a lot of Americans in this Western view of like, are, I think it is good to be original, and to think, deeply and differently, but at times it can over rotate into like, inventing reasons that may or may not be true. And for her, it was so natural just to say, it's like, yeah, like, we know the answer. And some people are like, why are our Chinese companies built something really fast? It looks like this and goes, and it just, there is this belief of

Auren Hoffman (55:51.894)

Right. They just copy and yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (55:54.326)

There's a right and wrong answer. I think that the thing that I try to pick up is you actually can be a pretty, it is good to be a student of other companies and you can understand what made them work really well and what didn't. And I find with lot of other entrepreneurs and then startup people, they like kind of just diss their competitors and like,

aren't that interested in learning of like what actually really worked and they assume they're not smart. They assume their original thinking is going to be better. And I think that there's something about the Chinese startup way of viewing the world of assume your competitors are actually really smart and they have a strong default answer and you need to, think sometimes those companies miss it. But I think like the perfect marriage is like assume they're great, take the good part and then figure out like what truly can be different and better.

Auren Hoffman (56:25.057)

Uh-huh.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (56:47.693)

And so those were probably two things.

Auren Hoffman (56:50.036)

That's really interesting. Two more questions we ask all of our guests. What's a conspiracy theory you believe?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (56:57.316)

my god,

This is a good question. What is a conspiracy theory, I believe?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (57:11.33)

I haven't thought about this as much.

Auren Hoffman (57:15.404)

Anything in like the banking world where, you know, they're like the big players are conspiring against the little guys or.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (57:23.721)

I,

I do think...

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (57:34.434)

I mean, in some sense, I actually think it was an accident that modern fintech was created. kind of do. So yes, think classically, I think the big banks have conspired from a regulatory perspective to with regulators who have very good intentions often to not allow anyone who wasn't a bank to get into banking. And I think that the

Auren Hoffman (58:02.636)

And they made it impossible to become a bank.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (58:06.058)

You can't buy a bank because you can't sell it. You cannot start a bank. It is even vague in how you can operate a bank. And, you know, for a country that values competition, I think that you had one of the most deeply uncompetitive sectors because of it. And I actually do think there is merit to that conspiracy. And I think in some sense, Dodd-Frank and then the Durbin Amendment

Auren Hoffman (58:15.213)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (58:35.112)

had nothing to do and no intention for the corporate credit card ecosystem, but I actually think was the domino that indirectly kind of led to the creation of modern fintech. so I think for people that have this view of there is a lot of regulatory capture in monopoly and financial services, I think that is true classically.

Auren Hoffman (59:03.726)

Alright, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (59:09.698)

yeah, hire the expert, hire the VP of whatever. They've seen this show before, some VCs that you closed around, find someone who knows what they're doing. I just find that leads to total brains off, lack of first principle thinking about what is the situation.

Auren Hoffman (59:12.873)

Okay, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (59:28.716)

Well, how does that jive with the, your, your China anecdote of like, okay, well, if this person's done it before, they can just copy the playbook here. Like is that, is in some ways you would do see those are almost diametrically opposed.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (59:43.906)

Not quite. I think your response is fair. think that the distinction is, and this is why I think a lot of there's a lot of Chinese companies that have been great second followers, but very few have leapfrogged and become the total preeminent if they have a copying culture, which is that I think that hiring the VP of whatever from some other place can accelerate you maybe in the short run. often if you are copying someone,

you can copy the design, but you don't know why that car was built that way or why that tool was exactly built into it. And I think that if your way of solving problem is I'm going to go copy it, set it and forget it, you may get many accelerations, but you can lose out the original first principles thinking of like, why was it this way? And so I believe, I actually believe you should hire consultants. You should ask for advice.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:39.138)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (01:00:39.33)

You should meet lots of people and aggressively like try to understand like what works And so you should talk to every VP of whatever but I think the decision of what you built what you pursue and what who you promote Has to come from like who's doing the work why and what what first principles originally in your business, but I actually think it's very popular bad advice because it sounds good And it allows people to skip over the harder lesson that I people need

Auren Hoffman (01:01:01.292)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:07.95)

What I found is interesting is that like, let's say you're a company at 10 million in revenues and you want to grow to a hundred, you know, they'll typically say, okay, great. Hired the VP of sales who, who went from 10 to a hundred in a similar company. and I think there's like two kinds of issues with that. One is that often the playbook today to go from 10 to a hundred is very different from the playbook that was maybe that person followed over the last five to eight years. and so.

Like that's just the wrong playbook just by default. And then the second thing is like they, went from 10 to a hundred. They might not want to go back to 10. Like they, they probably forgot how much grunt work there is at 10. Like they might want them to be much more strategic today and, and, do, and so they, they kind of already put in all the hard work. So it's not clear. They might think in their head, they want to go back to them, but they probably really don't want to go back to that grunt.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (01:02:03.954)

my God, totally. You're giving me weird chills just thinking about it. It's totally right. Most startups, the only strategy is just execution for a while. Eventually, maybe you earn the right to sit back, but even then, it's people and people are going to lead from the front. so don't be wrong, there's amazing BPs of people who've scaled.

you know, businesses and know a lot of good things, but you're totally right.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:36.814)

What I found actually is you can rent those people. If you want someone who grew up from 10 to 100, you can rent them for a couple of days a month and they would be happy to impart all their wisdom and advice to you. You could rent literally the very best person. You may only be higher, like the number 100 person, but you could rent the very best person that's out there. Then you could have...

somebody with a little bit more energy, maybe not as much experience, who can then implement those things.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (01:03:10.568)

And by the way, think this is exactly right and brilliant. And maybe to connect to two things. First, you can rent the person who then can go help the hero of their own journey, their hero's journey. They haven't done the run yet and that's the amazing pair. Help them see around corner. This person is going to work 100 hours a week, wants to prove it and is going to give it their all. And like that is such a good pair. And then last two, maybe in the come back to, you know, maybe you're the Colson's and you can hire whomever you want.

Or maybe you're not, but you know what? People would love to be an advisor and they can help for a little bit. Maybe some of them later will fall in love and come, or maybe you can say, a lot of our best early hires were initially they were advisors and saw what was going on. And I asked them like, who's the best designer you know, or up and coming. And it turns out other designers go ask mentors.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:40.738)

Yeah.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (01:04:06.528)

and they know who's great and who's looking and you don't. And occasionally they'll say, you know what, I'm the right one to come. so it's, yeah, rent, like approaching it in that way, I actually think is like, was very important for us early on. And we don't talk about that as much, but I think that's true for people building. I think it's still true.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:07.853)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:12.974)

Totally.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:26.846)

This has been awesome. Thank you, Eric Glyman for joining us. world of death. By the way, I follow you at E Glyman on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Eric Glyman (Ramp) (01:04:38.624)

Orrin, thanks a lot. I really enjoyed this.