I built a billion dollar company in 18 months

0:00:03 Can you build a billion-dollar company in only 18 months?
0:00:08 Today’s guest, his name is Eric Lyman. He’s a buddy of mine who started a company called Ramp.
0:00:12 And him and his co-founder, they asked themselves this question before they started the company.
0:00:17 They wanted to get to a billion-dollar valuation in only 18 months, and they reverse-engineered it.
0:00:22 And I’d heard him tell this story before, but he didn’t really give a lot of details on it.
0:00:26 And I thought it was amazing, the fact that they were this bold, and then they actually
0:00:30 pulled it off. So the company is worth something like $20 billion now, and they’re only, I think,
0:00:34 six years old. And so give this episode a listen. Let me know what you think.
0:00:38 Again, Eric Lyman of Ramp is on today’s episode of My First Million.
0:00:53 You said something that was pretty crazy. It was, I want to build a billion-dollar company in 18 months.
0:00:53 In 18 months, yeah.
0:01:00 And that was kind of shocking, because that’s crazy fast. Is that really what happened? You guys
0:01:01 had that conversation?
0:01:02 Yeah, that’s a real conversation.
0:01:05 You guys didn’t have, you and Kareem, were you on the same page?
0:01:10 We wanted to go fast, for sure. I think the world was moving faster than ever. We had already sold
0:01:14 our first company, and we were definitely, neither of us came for a whole lot. We were comfortable.
0:01:20 And, you know, I think even at the time, had already proven a couple things out, and, you know, in some
0:01:25 sense, had left. Like, I was a 26-year-old, you know, senior director of Capital One. I think he was, like,
0:01:31 the youngest person at that age. Like, we left very good setups. And so we knew that if we wanted to leave,
0:01:37 we wanted to go and make this company big, and either make it huge quickly or fail really quickly.
0:01:40 And so, yeah, Kareem really did have that conversation. I think he had it with Calvin,
0:01:46 who, you know, later, he cracked me up. I think when we finally did become a billion-dollar company,
0:01:56 and it did occur in 2021. And so it was less than two years from incorporation of the company.
0:01:58 No shit. Wait, two years after incorporation?
0:01:58 Yeah.
0:02:00 That’s insane.
0:02:05 Yeah. It was crazy. You know, a lot of magical things happened in 2021, but it really did happen.
0:02:09 You know, and Calvin said, you know, look, it’s best not to know the odds. You know,
0:02:12 if I had looked it up and known, I would have seen that there was no company in New York’s history ever
0:02:19 that was worth a billion dollars within 18 months or two years or three. But, yeah.
0:02:20 What was your revenue when you did that?
0:02:25 I mean, in 2021, geez, that was, you got to remember, this was, like,
0:02:33 peak excitement in the market. I think we started that year maybe around 10 million in revenue,
0:02:37 probably less. Which was six months into the company, you’re at a 10 million run rate.
0:02:45 So let me back it up. We incorporated the company in March of 2019. We launched it publicly in February
0:02:53 of 2020. The pandemic hit, things slowed down, then ramp just started really accelerating. I think that
0:02:58 year revenue grew something like 70 times year over year to the point where, in a small denominator,
0:03:05 But we had hit, it was, it was approaching 10 million a year before the company was out for
0:03:11 even a year. And by the end of 2021, again, I think the multiples really hadn’t changed too much,
0:03:18 but the company ended with an $8.1 billion valuation. And we were coming up to, but hadn’t yet crossed
0:03:20 100 million a year revenue. It was a crazy year.
0:03:25 So how many years until, how many months until 100 million run rate?
0:03:31 We were one of the fastest ever. I mean, so if you go back to it, we, I think, announced it,
0:03:42 I want to say in March of 2022, I think is when, uh, Paki McCormick, um, uh, discovered the company
0:03:46 deeply, become a very good friend. I think we’re at the article talking about it as well as the $8.1
0:03:54 billion valuation. I believe that was in March of, of 22. Um, we launched in Feb of 2020. I think we hit
0:03:59 our first, you know, million run rates sometime in the spring, maybe by early summer. And so if you look
0:04:04 at the traditional charts, there’s, it’s now become a bit of a meme of like time from a million to,
0:04:08 uh, a hundred million in revenue. Our chart’s actually wrong. That’s from like time from
0:04:14 incorporation. I want to say like 15 to 17 months from a million to a hundred million. It was
0:04:15 explosive.
0:04:21 That’s insane. And like, I don’t even know, I don’t know anything about, uh, the finance industry or,
0:04:25 or I don’t even know anything about your business model other than I use it. Like I know everything
0:04:29 about personal finance apps. I’m a huge nerd in that, but I don’t even know how
0:04:33 like I, you, you, you take a percentage of, of spend, I imagine, but I don’t even understand.
0:04:35 Explain to me how that works.
0:04:39 Uh, you know, I didn’t know anything about it either until I sold my last company to Capital
0:04:44 One and, and, and learn the business model. And so in, in, in, in financial services, there’s,
0:04:49 is particularly in the, the card space, there’s two basic business models, the credit cards,
0:04:54 there’s two basic ways that they, that they tend to make money. Uh, number one is a transaction
0:04:57 based model where there’s this thing called interchange. Every time a card is swiped,
0:05:02 there’s a series of payments. The merchant, um, rightfully so gets the, the lion’s share
0:05:06 and then folks involved in moving the money. Take a little bit, a little bit goes to, let’s
0:05:11 say the merchant processor, the people who accept the cards, route it, uh, and deal with all the
0:05:16 that would be like a stripe, um, or square, maybe a Shopify. And they take a huge percentage.
0:05:21 Right. So they collect it, but they don’t keep a huge percentage. So, um, you might see headline
0:05:28 on some of these sites, you know, 2.9% plus 40 cents or something like that. At the very end of
0:05:34 the day, they might keep, you know, it varies anywhere from like 0.1 to 0.5% is ultimately their
0:05:39 net take, but the gross is much higher because they’re collecting. They also pay the networks.
0:05:44 So they have a few folks involved. They have the merchant bank. Um, so you as a customer have
0:05:49 banks that’s the, you know, uh, it’s deposited to some bank, which maybe you keep it there or you
0:05:53 move it to your, your business’s bank account. They’ll keep a little bit, maybe 10 cents visa or
0:06:00 a master card. They’ll keep a little bit to call it like 0.1 to 0.4%. And then the remainder tends
0:06:05 to go to the issuer and the issuer processor. That’s generally the people that you think of as like
0:06:09 people’s name is on your card. It could be like a chase or it could be like a ramp or
0:06:13 something like that, or a capital one. If you have a capital one card or Wells Fargo,
0:06:19 if you have that kind of a card. And so the issuer in interchange is traditionally keeping
0:06:22 most of that interchange. And the reasons actually make sense when you think about it,
0:06:27 you know, especially in credit, they’re taking on the risk. They’re saying that merchant,
0:06:32 we will pay you, you know, even if our customer doesn’t pay us back, when you accept this payment,
0:06:37 you were getting, you were getting paid for it. And if the customer later defaults,
0:06:41 that’s on us. And so they’re generally taking the credit risk. They have the operational costs
0:06:45 of standing up the card programs. And actually classically, if you, if you look historically,
0:06:51 these rates used to be very high. A lot of these came from like the old department stores in the
0:06:55 early 1900s, where you’d have like a bank set up shop, uh, actually in the department stores and
0:06:57 interchange could be as high as five or 6%.
0:07:00 18 months in at a hundred million in revenue, how many employees did you have?
0:07:03 Somewhere between a hundred and 200, maybe 200.
0:07:06 Dude. So I don’t, that’s just like boggles my mind because
0:07:12 my company is I think two years old and we’re small or it’s a bootstrap company. We own the whole
0:07:17 thing. And so I think we have 15 or 18 people, but when you’re doing everything yourself as a
0:07:22 bootstrap company, just like getting one or two hires a month is hard. I’m sure at Paribus,
0:07:27 you were feeling the same thing where just like the logistics of getting that many people.
0:07:28 Yes.
0:07:32 Just the day to day, like, does everyone have a computer? That’s incredibly challenging. So
0:07:39 that’s 10 people a month that you need to do that. Yeah. It’s kind of challenging to understand how,
0:07:40 how fast that is.
0:07:46 I mean, now we’re over 1100 people. There can be single, you know, two week periods when we have
0:07:51 40 to 50 people that start, you know, as I, I totally agree with you. You definitely need
0:07:57 great software. And, you know, even to the point that you’d said earlier, like you use ramp,
0:08:01 but don’t, don’t totally understand exactly how it works, how all this stuff works. I think there
0:08:07 is in any business so much complexity in going and starting a company and operating and scaling it.
0:08:12 And I think there’s an entire class of tools that tend to be great business models. And some of the
0:08:16 fastest growing companies in the last few years have actually been that, you know, you can look at like
0:08:20 a ramp in the card space is what it’s doing. It’s allowing you to scale up and down with full
0:08:25 control, full visibility, all your expenses managed, your accounting managed. Done. You don’t need to
0:08:29 think about it. In HR and payroll, Rippling is a great example where, you know, I think that they’re
0:08:34 eight years old. I think their last round, Rippling, Rippling, you know, in HR, eight years old,
0:08:37 they’re eight years old. They started in this crazy. I was one of the first customers. I mean,
0:08:42 maybe 2016, maybe nine, but you know, they’re, they’re, they’re not that old. And I think their last
0:08:46 round, I want to say it was at 17 billion. That’s insane, right? Yeah. There’s a lot of
0:08:50 these tools, HubSpot, you know, you mentioned them, like they’re an incredible company that
0:08:55 takes what used to be, there’s lots of little paper cuts that generally need to deal with as
0:08:59 a business owner and abstract those away. And so I think kind of these boring business models can
0:09:04 actually be very good. I think I’ve been able to grow into some of like my success a bit because
0:09:11 it’s happens a little bit slower when you’re 32 years old or whatever, and you have 200 people
0:09:15 or you have this valuation or whatever like that. It’s a little bit overnight feeling.
0:09:21 Did you have like weird feelings of like self-actualization of like, oh my God, all I,
0:09:25 what I wanted is actually here this fast. And I don’t know if I’m actually ready to
0:09:28 step into that position of, or have this responsibility.
0:09:34 There’s always like imposter syndrome and, you know, you know, and I would say, so there are a couple
0:09:40 things. I mean, we, from early on design the company explicitly around velocity. If you kind
0:09:44 of step back and sort of look at the particular industry that we’re playing in, not a joke,
0:09:49 most of the founders of the companies that we compete with actually wore top hats. You know,
0:09:56 they, they lived in the, you know, 1800s, you know, like James Pierpont Morgan, Henry Wells,
0:10:02 like, you know, you, you, you look at the people who started Amex, um, city chase, you know, nothing
0:10:05 wrong with, with these, these businesses. In fact, there’s a lot to love about them. They’re enormous
0:10:12 businesses, but you know, a lot of their fundamental edges were in long time, enduring brands,
0:10:17 unbelievable distribution, risk and underwriting, the benefits of scale and of time, but all of them
0:10:22 move very slowly. I think an analogy I like to use sometimes is like, you know, imagine that, um,
0:10:28 you wake up one day and you have to use like the computer or like the cell phone technology or like
0:10:32 the tools that your parents, uh, used when they were your age. It’d be very like, you couldn’t do
0:10:36 this podcast. It’d be very hard to run your business in that way. But if you woke up and you had to use
0:10:42 their bank account or their credit card or debit card, you probably could, um, you know, not too bad.
0:10:46 And, and I think it’s sort of proof of like, not too much innovation has happened in the products
0:10:51 haven’t fundamentally evolved over the past 30, 40 years is, you know, from, you know, no phones to flip
0:10:57 phones to computers that can think. Um, and so a lot of our view was early on, we needed to count the
0:11:02 days, move at incredible velocity and simply be designed to ship things faster. And so today we’re
0:11:08 2,310 days old. Um, we’re six years. Yeah, that’s insane. By the way, you, you just said that,
0:11:14 you know, the day, I mean, that’s just like a radical thing. It’s, uh, you know, and I remember in
0:11:18 the early days when you go back to that 18 month sat, you were, we were talking about the beginning,
0:11:25 you know, um, we were like hell bent on, okay, within 45 days, uh, we want to be approved by the
0:11:29 network within 60. We want to be approved by your bank within 70. We want to be, you know,
0:11:34 funding our first transactions. We want to get this product in front of customers as fast as possible.
0:11:40 And so a lot of what we were trying to do is just move very quickly. We had set goals that we wanted
0:11:44 to grow the company 10% a week. You know, um, once you’ve got the scale, 20% a month.
0:11:47 Does that burn people out? Uh, it’s very intense.
0:11:53 You don’t have this typical personality type. Like usually people who succeed as fast as you have
0:11:57 are very, very high on the disagreeable scale. Yeah.
0:12:03 You seem pretty easy to get along and you’re very calm. I don’t understand like how that personality
0:12:10 type has like been able to grow this. My view is like, I don’t, uh, I’m not trying to find folks
0:12:15 who are, you know, low cost, you know, um, push them to an extreme, burn them out. I would rather
0:12:20 find people who like just find extreme joy in their craft, uh, and just set them up where they can be
0:12:26 doing just that as much as possible all the time. But I think that you have to, if you want to move
0:12:30 quickly, you can’t do everything. There’s only one or two things you can pick. And you try to have
0:12:35 like extreme focus as a company on that. Uh, and just having an everyday trying to just ask like,
0:12:37 what are the things we can do to optimize just this one function?
0:12:43 All right. So I’ve built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year,
0:12:47 and I’ve built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year. And so I have a little
0:12:54 bit of experience launching, building, creating new things. And I actually don’t come up with a lot of
0:13:00 original ideas. Instead, what I’m really, really good at what my skill set is, is researching different
0:13:06 ideas, different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies. And I didn’t invent this,
0:13:09 by the way, we had this guy, Brad Jacobs. We talked to him on the podcast. He started like four or five
0:13:13 different publicly traded companies with tens of billions of dollars each. He actually is the one
0:13:18 who I learned how to do this from. And so with the team at HubSpot, we put together all of my research
0:13:23 tactics, frameworks, techniques on spotting different opportunities in the market, reverse
0:13:29 engineering companies, and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with
0:13:33 a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks. And so if you want to see
0:13:37 my framework, you can check it out. The link is below in the YouTube description.
0:13:43 What businesses were you going to start instead of RAM? So you had just sold Paribus. Is it Paribus?
0:13:43 Yeah.
0:13:45 Have you ever said, how much money did you make off that?
0:13:49 We even, I mean, talked about it publicly, but it was mid-eight figures.
0:13:50 You each walked away with that?
0:13:51 No, that was the total deal.
0:13:52 The total.
0:13:54 But we hadn’t raised very much. I mean, we had…
0:13:54 There’s three of y’all?
0:14:02 It was really Kareem and I, you know, then. But we had raised something like $2 million at the time.
0:14:05 And so there were some investors, but most of it went to founders and employees.
0:14:10 So it was enough that you’re like, I’m good, potentially good for forever, depending on how
0:14:14 I live, but I have enough. So you’re sitting around and you’re like at Capital One doing your
0:14:18 thing. What was your list of ideas that you guys were like scheming on where you’re like,
0:14:22 it could be this, it could be this. What if it was this and this angle? Like what was that list?
0:14:23 So…
0:14:24 I think everyone has a list.
0:14:29 Exactly. You go through all these different phases. So the first year, we were just dead
0:14:34 set on, these people just changed our lives. We want to make sure that they feel incredibly
0:14:38 good actually about this deal. So the first year, we actually didn’t spend too much time at all.
0:14:42 You know, we wanted to go and make sure there wasn’t failure to launch. Like we didn’t get
0:14:46 crushed kind of by the weight of joining this 50,000 person company and that, that…
0:14:47 Yeah. So you’re just being a good seller.
0:14:53 Yeah. Which I think is good, but, but sort of like underrated kind of the value of like
0:14:57 integrity relationships or, you know, you know, that was important to me when I sold to 100%.
0:15:01 I was like, I remember thinking, I think they got the better of the deal, this or that,
0:15:06 but I was like, you know, I’m happy, but I’m also, I kind of want to have a reputation as
0:15:07 someone who…
0:15:07 Yeah.
0:15:10 It was, we all won. We all win.
0:15:14 Exactly. Right. And I am more flaggative, like for folks who are like young and, you know,
0:15:17 the value of like a great reference of people saying like…
0:15:18 The world’s small, man.
0:15:23 It’s so small. And so that was, that was the first year. I think the second we start saying,
0:15:26 okay, this is interesting, but, you know, I miss the speed.
0:15:27 Yeah.
0:15:31 You know, I feel like I’m at a cruise ship versus a small speedboat of, of kind of going and starting
0:15:36 a company. And so I think I did what a lot of entrepreneurs do, which is I started trying
0:15:42 to come up with, you know, ideas in the abstract and, you know, the, I think we went on a journey
0:15:46 of like bad ideas until eventually it was, you know, came back to good ones. And so I think at the
0:15:52 time, you know, I was looking at, I think similar to our talk before this, we were, you know,
0:15:54 looking at places in New York and they’re all kind of bad and we’re wondering, why are
0:15:59 they bad? And we should, you know, cars are manufactured, planes are manufactured, all these
0:16:03 products that are low cost, affordable, but wondrous that anyone can afford are manufactured.
0:16:04 Why aren’t homes manufactured?
0:16:09 So you’re going to, you’re, you’re interested in manufactured, like, like when I was a kid,
0:16:14 like a bunch of my poor friends, like, and my grandparents, they lived in, uh, we just call
0:16:15 the, uh, like mobile homes.
0:16:15 Yeah.
0:16:19 Like it’s just many, I guess that’s what they’re called. I mean, the nice way is manufactured
0:16:19 houses.
0:16:24 They’re manufactured house. I mean, there was also, um, you know, like one of the places that
0:16:31 like is extremely populous. Um, it’s the biggest city in the world and yet housing isn’t so crazy
0:16:35 unaffordable is like Tokyo or you go to Japan and it’s because they actually, most of the
0:16:39 home builders are home manufacturers. Um, and things are very standard. The cost of a new home
0:16:45 build is like not that expensive. Um, and, uh, you know, uh, I think there’s all sorts of issues
0:16:49 in the States related to this and we thought, wow, we should look in, into like manufacturing
0:16:53 homes. And I still buy the, uh, and I think that there, I’ve invested in a few of them.
0:16:58 Yeah. They’re, um, they’re very hard. It was very popular right around when you were starting
0:17:04 a ramp and I invested in two or three. Yeah. Uh, that space interested me. None of them have
0:17:09 like completely taken off in, uh, ultimately we decided not to do this for a couple of reasons.
0:17:14 So hard. One actually had no business in doing it. And I rented an apartment in New York and never
0:17:20 owned a home. I manufactured anything. Um, and, um, you know, there was no connecting story to it,
0:17:24 but then the more you read about it, um, the constraint in the bottleneck was not around
0:17:29 manufacturing at all. Uh, it was all the zoning. Um, and it was that you could manufacture a house
0:17:35 that was zoned to go nowhere. Um, uh, unless you could go and see it to, there was a lot of complex
0:17:39 problems. And by the way, I hope someone solves a lot of this. I think that there’s, uh, you think
0:17:44 that’s still interesting. I think it’s still interesting. And my view is it’s like the manufacturing
0:17:48 is part of it, but the zoning question is very real. It’s how do you actually get, and it can show up in
0:17:53 all these funny ways of like, which way does the house face, you know, how far back does it have to
0:17:59 be set? What are the proportions? Joe Debbie is doing something in this space. I think if people crack this,
0:18:03 I think it is an enormous opportunity, but it is like a big slog. And like, this is one of those
0:18:08 businesses where you’re not going to 10 X for a while, you’re going to be 10%, 20% compound,
0:18:12 but there’s a great business. I do think to be built there. Okay. It’s just too expensive.
0:18:16 So that was on the list of like tractor trailer, or I don’t know what you call it. Uh, dude, like
0:18:21 my friends, like their home or like my grandparents, they’d lived in a place where like their home was
0:18:27 delivered on like a truck. Yeah. Yeah. And so, okay. So that’s the interesting space. What else was on
0:18:32 the list? So that was on the list. Um, we, uh, there was various like random crypto things. We were,
0:18:35 you know, we’d come and I had been interested in the stuff, probably going back to like 2012 and
0:18:41 routine. So we spent a little bit of time around that space. Um, uh, you know, we spent some time,
0:18:46 um, you know, helping out different friends, starting businesses. Uh, we were close to Z at Rogue. We
0:18:52 started the direct to consumer kind of, um, healthcare business folks at Candid. And so we spent some time
0:18:58 on that kind of world. And then I think where it got interesting again, as we came back to the things
0:19:02 that we actually knew in a bit of our roots. And so there was almost two variants of what
0:19:07 eventually became ramp. Uh, variant number one is what turned into ramp. And we can come back to that
0:19:13 at some point. The other was this view of, you know, in the, in the card space, um, which is,
0:19:17 it feels almost voodoo from the outside. It’s unclear how you start these things, how the
0:19:21 business model work, but we knew this cause we had spent a bunch of years inside of Capital One,
0:19:27 studied the models really deeply, um, knew the history well, and had some credibility in the space.
0:19:32 Um, we’re also very interested in the partnership business, um, and the co-brand business. So let’s
0:19:36 say that you were, um, you go to Best Buy and at the very end someone says, would you like to open a
0:19:42 Best Buy credit card? Um, someone is doing that. Um, there’s people powering those business models.
0:19:49 Who are they? It’s a big one. Um, you know, uh, Synchrony, um, uh, is a, is, is a really, um, big name
0:19:53 in it. Capital One, you know, had a large co-brand business. Amex, I mean, all the large banks.
0:19:55 And those are huge tens of billions of dollars company.
0:19:56 Barclays, uh,
0:19:58 How big is Synchrony? I’ve never heard of it.
0:20:01 MBNA, uh, tens, tens of billions of dollars. I haven’t looked up their, their-
0:20:07 You know, that is, is, well, certainly in market cap, um, huge businesses. And the basic
0:20:11 premise of that is like, look, is, is we had a side of our business at Paribus where we worked
0:20:18 very closely with retailers. Um, you know, all of these, these, um, stores have, um, uh, strong
0:20:23 customer loyalty and the, and, and credit cards are great products, but they’re very hard to
0:20:29 sell. And so the basic business model was if you could, as at a, you know, if you’re a store,
0:20:34 you had customer loyalty, if you could convert even a tiny percentage, uh, of these customers
0:20:38 to just take on a new credit card. And, um, that was it. You would make a little bit of
0:20:42 interchange. You would kind of lower your costs when they were shopping with you, but also
0:20:47 you could make a little bit back at all the other places that customers went and shopped.
0:20:51 And so the whole question was, could you build a product that was standard enough,
0:20:55 simple, modifiable enough that you could convince lots of different stores. And as this was going
0:21:02 on, the online boom was happening. Shopify was, you know, opening up new retailers and stores
0:21:08 everywhere. Creators were getting big. Um, you know, and we thought there was a chance to have a modern,
0:21:13 um, card for, uh, businesses and creators. And, you know, MBNA was a big company. I mean,
0:21:17 they, they figured out, um, when you look at university credit cards, that’s like a huge
0:21:24 business. Uh, Darren Murphy is here in New York. Um, his business is doing really, really well.
0:21:27 Imprint. I’ve heard of them. Imprint. They’re doing very well.
0:21:32 These take a long time. Even in the cases where like they’re the fastest ever, you’re going to be
0:21:35 building these businesses for many, many years. And you have to ask yourself, it’s like, do I want to
0:21:41 be working on this for decades? I thought that it was crazy that the largest credit card companies
0:21:46 on the planet were working really hard to get customers spend a little bit more than they
0:21:51 thought. And then once they do, they would work really hard to convince people that the points
0:21:56 they got were worth a lot and then devalue them in the background. Hey, let’s take a quick break.
0:22:00 You know, HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Uh, Tumblr needed to move fast. They were
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0:22:25 HubSpot.com. All right, back to the show. It was pretty funny. You said, I read so many books
0:22:31 on the banking industry. Yeah. And you’re like, I spent weeks doing it. I’m like, oh, I would have thought
0:22:34 you would have spent like five years. You’re like, you must have read a shitload of books.
0:22:40 So in a very short amount of time, did you learn about any of the weird or shady stuff
0:22:45 that the banking industry does for consumers or like the history of credit cards and things like
0:22:50 that? Like I remember reading about, um, I think it was bank of America. Was that the first credit
0:22:55 card? Yeah. And how I believe what they did. Well, first of all, like one of them started as like a
0:22:59 dining club card. Yeah. But then another one, what they did was, I think they just handed out
0:23:03 credit cards to farmers in central California, something crazy like that, right?
0:23:10 So the history, so it started by a guy named AP Giannini. Um, I think it was bank, uh, bank
0:23:16 di America, di Italia. It was basically bank of Italy started by a very poor, uh, Italian immigrant,
0:23:24 uh, is functionally how it got started. And his first big opportunity, um, really was in like the,
0:23:30 I think it was like the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco where effectively, you know, he was
0:23:36 working and kind of supporting and lending to like grocers, immigrants, farmers, folks who would come
0:23:40 into SF and trade after the earthquake, there were fires everywhere. A huge portion of San Francisco
0:23:46 burned down. And he was one of the only people that supposedly the story goes, he set up a table,
0:23:51 um, out in the middle on market street. And he started making loans then and there on the spot.
0:23:56 And he went from this like tiny bank to effectively like started going everywhere. And, and his history
0:24:02 is pretty interesting. He, he, uh, so it was, it was kind of this, um, bank to, to merchants and then
0:24:09 eventually to consumers in, I think in the early 1900s, uh, Woodrow Wilson was trying to supposedly
0:24:14 encourage lots of different banks to go and lend to small businesses and the emerging middle class,
0:24:17 right. This is the things you hear about if like the Americans are buying their first car,
0:24:22 their first washing machine, all that kind of stuff. And, um, you were very big on it. And so he’s,
0:24:26 he was, he, I think was famous for setting up franchise banking where there was like little
0:24:31 branches and branch bankings and all sorts of little cities. And they sort of took over what used to be
0:24:37 like, um, and this is relevant when you get into the history of, of card to cards. Um, one of the,
0:24:41 the most common places that people would take loans would be in an apartment store. So if you wanted to
0:24:48 buy, you know, um, uh, you may know that Sears was the parent company to discover or, um, bank of
0:24:53 America would actually go into the branches in like the top, you know, somewhere in like a Macy’s. So
0:24:58 instead of Macy’s giving you a loan, so if you wanted to buy a washing machine for, you know, a dollar,
0:25:04 you know, um, you would walk out of it, um, after making a 10 cent down payment and you pay them back,
0:25:09 they said, we’ll take over that Macy’s. You don’t need to underwrite each customer. We as the bank
0:25:12 can do that for you. And that was the start of it. What would they do if you didn’t pay?
0:25:19 Um, you know, it was a loan. Uh, and so it was whatever banks normally do. Um, you know, maybe they
0:25:23 could go and take the good, but it just was a loan. Did credit bureaus exist then? Uh, this was before
0:25:27 credit bureaus. So what do you do if someone doesn’t pay? I think that was why they had the local
0:25:31 bankers, you know, they would go and work. I think they would try to collect for a lot of years,
0:25:36 but that was like, is this like early 1900s banking? Um, the, the part where you’re getting
0:25:42 to was by the time I think bank of America was the biggest, certainly the biggest bank in the U S it
0:25:48 might’ve been the biggest bank in the world. Um, it was just enormous, enormous scale. And I think the
0:25:55 town, I want to say it was Fremont. Um, and so this was in the fifties and I think that it was something
0:26:03 like 60% or 70% of everybody who lived in this town were customers of bank of America. And,
0:26:07 you know, if you were going to a department store, they had this, this branch that you could go
0:26:13 and go to. But, you know, if you were going to like, um, you know, any random, you know, hard goods
0:26:17 store, uh, you couldn’t get a loan for it. And so they took this bet and they said, let’s just get the
0:26:20 rest of the town. Let’s get everybody. And we’re going to send you cards. I think they mailed everybody
0:26:26 in the town. I was like a four or five digit card and, uh, you could go use this and you could say,
0:26:33 put it on my card. Um, and you would go and pay the bank back later. Um, and it just exploded.
0:26:38 Um, suddenly, you know, they, almost everyone in the town became customers and people were using it all
0:26:43 the time. People, once they got access to credit, started being able to afford more things. And it was
0:26:47 good for merchants too. You know, merchants who couldn’t access and couldn’t get a branch to come in
0:26:52 could start to compete with the, the, you know, large department stores that could. And it gave
0:26:59 rise to, you know, the bank of merit card. And so the initial credit card was bank of merit card.
0:27:03 Once they showed it successful, went to their competitor banks or regional banks and saying,
0:27:08 I will run this program for you. We can issue bank of merit cards for the commerce bank of Seattle.
0:27:14 You know, you can issue it to your, your customers and, uh, we will deal with the operations paying,
0:27:17 you know, collecting from the stores, paying, you know, doing the underwriting, all that kind of
0:27:20 stuff. So it was a franchise model. It wasn’t the model that it was today.
0:27:23 Was that, is credit like a uniquely American thing?
0:27:30 It, you know, I think there’s a good argument to say yes. Um, you know, in, in, in some of it comes
0:27:35 back to that early 1900s kind of lineage, whereas this was going on, you saw the birth of the American
0:27:43 consumer where you’d have department stores, cars, automobiles, and, um, you saw financing for the
0:27:49 emerging middle class. I would say in Europe, um, even to this day, um, you see this very
0:27:53 different behavior where, yeah, like for example, they don’t, they put way more down when they buy a
0:27:59 home. And this is exactly it. Americans are very accepting of borrowing and debt, you know? And I
0:28:05 think that’s the, uh, that’s the perverse way to say it. I think the non-polite way to say it is like,
0:28:11 you know, in Europe, if you’re rich, you can borrow. And if you’re not paying cash, that’s all you can do.
0:28:16 Uh, and I think it’s actually much harder for people who aren’t in the middle class who are poor,
0:28:21 you know, to borrow in the U S people, you know, it’s this view of, you can kind of pick,
0:28:26 pick yourself up by your own bootstrings. Um, you know, you can go and, you know, borrow for that car
0:28:32 or for that farm equipment, um, or that laundry machine. So you can go and build your business and
0:28:36 go into it. And so I think there’s a lot of good that comes with it. Obviously sometimes there’s,
0:28:41 there’s some bad people can get into credit issues. Um, but I think on net, you know, most businesses,
0:28:46 it takes, it’s the startup costs are real, but once you get going, you can build an extraordinary
0:28:51 business. I listen to founders all the time. And like, I was listening to the Lizotica episode and
0:28:57 I’m really fascinated with building a company that can last for 50, a hundred, 200 years, like something
0:29:02 where God willing, I hope this is true, but my children want to get involved in some capacity.
0:29:10 Uh, and it could last beyond me. Typically those, I think those businesses that do that are not the
0:29:17 fastest growing companies. I actually agree with like the basic physics of what I think David and
0:29:24 the founders podcast studies and what you’re getting at too, of, of like, I think if you, to get down to
0:29:29 the core of what makes great businesses, it’s not like who grew a hundred percent or 200 or whatever
0:29:36 this year, it’s that which businesses can grow 30% for 30 years. And if you do that, you will be a
0:29:42 giant business. That’s not what you did. Our, our view is that we can. Um, and like the crazy part is
0:29:49 like, we have grown extraordinarily quickly. We’re still just about doubling each year. Um, uh, at
0:29:54 enormous scale, I think we are one and a half percent ish of the corporate and small business
0:29:59 card market in the U S. And so if you just look at the physics of it, even if we were to massively
0:30:07 decelerate and start growing 30% for decades, it’s physically possible. The market is so big.
0:30:13 You’re sort of like hanging out with like the Illuminati a little bit where it’s like these old
0:30:17 money families. Cause that’s what a lot of the banking industry is made up of because they’ve been
0:30:21 around for 200 years. They’ve been dealing with money forever. Have you noticed or found anything
0:30:28 that you are shocked by where you’re like, if the consumer knew that this is how this setup is,
0:30:35 they would be infuriated. It’s a, there’s a lot there in, in, in what you’re asking. So one,
0:30:41 these families, like, I think that they’re focused on doing simple things well and doing it for a very,
0:30:46 very, very long time and consistently. And, uh, a lot of these families just like don’t sell.
0:30:49 That’s the biggest takeaway from the Founders Podcast is don’t sell.
0:30:56 Don’t fight or interrupt the power of compounding. You want to find a business where you can just
0:31:03 compound for a long time. Uh, and so I would say when you’re just starting out or if you’re building,
0:31:08 like you’re terrified of like losing money or things going sideways, you have real costs,
0:31:13 families, friends, things to take care of. And so you don’t interrupt the debt. You want to,
0:31:19 when things get risky, you sell. Um, but I think a lot of these families just stayed in for a long
0:31:25 time. Uh, when there was huge, I mean, classically, you’d see a significant recession in the U S every
0:31:32 seven to 11 years, uh, consistently. Uh, a lot of people will sell out at the bottom, um, uh, because
0:31:37 they can’t take any more pain, uh, or they can’t take the risk of it going even further. And I think
0:31:41 the difference to a lot of these families is they would figure out how could you avoid it? How could
0:31:46 you go and stay in? You know, I, obviously I’ve never, none of my family had anything like this.
0:31:51 And so I, I, uh, also too, I think as a kid was very skeptical of people who grew up with a lot of
0:31:57 running my company Hampton, it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses. And
0:32:03 I’m always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets, emails, and clunky tools that do not
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0:33:09 and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that Sam sent you. One of my favorite
0:33:15 biographies is a Titan by John Rock or about John Rockefeller. Yeah. And David Chernow, who’s the author,
0:33:20 he wrote one on JP Morgan, which I’m going to get to. Yeah. And it’s fun. It’s fun reading about these old
0:33:26 banking families because they’re full stories and they’re typically nutty. Yeah. Um, you are going
0:33:33 to be an old banking family. You know, that’s kind of like crazy to think about. It’s, um, you know,
0:33:38 does that mess with you? I think that a lot of the families of the past have done a great job of being
0:33:44 like involved civically. I think that a lot of them have been, uh, more upstanding. I wouldn’t say all
0:33:50 of them have been, but I do think that, you know, like I’m in my mid thirties. I don’t know that I’ve
0:33:56 thought so far ahead in on like a legacy perspective, but yes, ramp is a company is getting very valuable,
0:34:03 but like all my stock is in ramp. It’s just a certificate. Um, and it’s only become valuable
0:34:08 because we’ve built something that makes a lot of people a lot better off. My whole obsession is like,
0:34:13 how do we keep doing that for a very long time? And you know, uh, maybe the money comes with it,
0:34:18 but like, that’s not why I do it. What was the reason why you did it? So the first company we
0:34:24 started was definitely around like, you know, I, I remember when our, we were down to like one month
0:34:29 of, or like a few weeks of savings and like, that’s it. And like the worst, it’s the worst. Like a lot
0:34:33 of it is usually, but you probably felt that way the whole time. Yeah. Like that burden. I remember I
0:34:37 felt that burden for four years. And you’re just working your ass off the worst every weekend.
0:34:41 And like, it’s hard to relate to really like people cause you’re terrified. It’s like, I remember in
0:34:47 college, I had this, uh, girlfriend who cheated on me. And I remember like here, like, but sorry,
0:34:51 dude. Yeah. Yeah. I remember like, and then she’s like, go to the, it was horrible. And like,
0:34:57 she would go out and I’m like, I had this like anxiety all the time. Like, like bothers me. And
0:35:01 then when I like started a business, I would remember like checking the bank account all the time.
0:35:04 And I’m like, that same anxiety. I’m like, I don’t want to look. I don’t want to know. I just
0:35:08 want to bury my head. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be part of this. Yeah. I felt that way for
0:35:14 four years. I’m curious if it changed for you too, but like after the sale, like suddenly you have
0:35:19 security, right? Like your, your bank account looks a little more, more flush. You move it out of the
0:35:23 student checking account to something more secure. You know, you’re good. And then at some point,
0:35:29 you know, it’s, uh, I don’t know, hedonic adaptation. You get used to it. Um, it’s just
0:35:34 like a number and account. And then you have like your same anxieties, your same, you have the same
0:35:39 shit, the same stuff, all that kind of stuff. It’s better though. It’s better. It’s better.
0:35:46 It’s better, but you have a similar anxieties, but it’s not existential. You are. It is sort of
0:35:51 existential, but it’s not like the baseline happiness of knowing that you’re not going to
0:35:57 be on the street is makes like the baseline that goes up. I agree with all this. Half the time I
0:36:01 listen to founders and I’m like, well, every time I listen to founders, I think I’m going to, I’m going
0:36:07 to own this for 50 or a hundred years. Yeah. And then during the day when I’m having a pain in the
0:36:13 ass, like issue come up, I’m like, we’re going to set this up so we could flip this thing.
0:36:20 Like it always changes, right? Like your mood, your emotions are powerful. And do you think you’ll
0:36:29 run this or have equity in it 50 years from now? Or would you sell in five or 10 years if it, um,
0:36:34 was like a no brainer deal? I was, this is the last company I’d ever work on. You know, I really,
0:36:41 you know, I, uh, your partners feel that way. Yes. Yeah. You know, and it’s, it’s one of these
0:36:46 things too, where like, you know, I remember even in the early days of, of going through, like there
0:36:51 was deep pain, right? If you’re, if you’re growing this quickly, you know, what certainly got you here
0:36:54 won’t get you there. And I think that some of what Kareem is saying is like, look, if I’m going to go
0:36:58 through all this pain, like he has, it doesn’t seem like he went through that much pain. If I’m like
0:37:02 looking at you guys from the outside, of course, it’s always more challenging, way more harder than it
0:37:08 looks. But like, when I’m like, I don’t know, a hundred million in revenue and in 18 months like
0:37:13 that, like, yeah, like even though it’s hard, you’re still winning. And that momentum, like that it’s
0:37:18 really all about dopamine. That makes you feel good. I agree with you. So some of it was like not
0:37:22 planning for downside and not solving problems until they hit us in our first business. So in our first
0:37:30 business, we had a day when, uh, we lost 75% of our revenue overnight vaporized. There were risks that
0:37:34 we knew about that we didn’t properly manage. Um, and one of the things that ramp that we
0:37:38 resolved to do is like Kareem and I and others are going to just going to beat the shit out of each
0:37:44 other all the time, uh, worrying about problems, um, that are three to six months to a year out in the
0:37:50 future. And so it’s true. If you look at kind of ramps trajectory, it has been kind of nonstop
0:37:56 growth, um, fairly consistently up into the right in terms of like the, the revenue, the cashflow,
0:38:01 profitability, all those kinds of metrics has been consistently good, but it’s because inside of it,
0:38:08 um, there is so much like agony that we spend over like this metric that’s going to affect how we
0:38:12 perform, uh, in three months from now is not going the wrong way is not going the right way. What are
0:38:17 we doing about it? And so it’s a lot of internally, um, beating each other up. Like I often, you know,
0:38:23 when, when you look at like, like a, I think the analogy is like an athlete, um, you know,
0:38:28 you look at like, uh, it was just Wimbledon over the weekend. Um, and, you know, Sinner and Alcaraz,
0:38:31 like each of them look like they’re playing effortlessly. You can pull off these shots.
0:38:35 You don’t imagine it’s because there’s been years and years and years of when you’re not looking,
0:38:40 um, they’re just obsessing, practicing, trying these shots. So when it counts, they’re able to do it.
0:38:44 And so I think there’s a lot of similarities there. Um, and, and what I would say is like,
0:38:49 is, is, is, you know, for cream, it was amplified. He, he had, um, you know, he’s three kids. Now he,
0:38:53 he got started or earlier than, than I did. And he’s like, look, these are some of the most valuable,
0:38:58 you know, hours I’ll ever have. And if we’re going to go through this, like it’s going to be because
0:39:01 we’re going to, the, the ambition is going to be real. And if we have a problem, we’re going to confront
0:39:05 it right away. What do you like to read? I like to read. Um, it’s part of why I knew I like the
0:39:10 founders podcast so much, like biographies of other founders. I like, um, reading about like, um,
0:39:15 you know, design. Are you a designer? Uh, I really like it. So the, the first
0:39:20 company, uh, Paribus, I had design and product reported to me. And so I, I had to spend a lot
0:39:24 of years kind of like thinking about like, you know, um, the principles of it, what makes products
0:39:29 great. And, and so I, I, uh, I love it. I would probably get booted off of our design team. Uh,
0:39:34 I don’t think I have quite the level of, uh, of, of talent and crafting, but I definitely spent a lot
0:39:38 of time thinking about it. What biographies? In terms of favorites or what am I reading now?
0:39:43 Um, I mean, my, you know, it’s, uh, I think I probably read, you know, 15 biographies of,
0:39:48 of Steve jobs. You know, it’s, uh, uh, I, I think as, as great as people think he is,
0:39:53 I think he’s still underrated, um, for what he was able to do and how consistently he was able to,
0:39:58 to do it. And, um, I also think that he changed a lot over the years. I think he gets kind of
0:40:03 typecasted this like brilliant asshole, which like, uh, I think he was at the start of his career,
0:40:08 but I think he got much more interesting, um, uh, cared about people,
0:40:14 um, in a much deeper way than I think comes across. Um, uh, in some of that is like,
0:40:18 I think people like conflict and people like controversy, but kind of forget, um, to look
0:40:22 at his career as he softened over the years. And I think ultimately, I think that’s when he built
0:40:25 Apple into the powerhouse that it is today.
0:40:28 I’ve been struggling to find biographies where I admire their whole life.
0:40:33 Yeah. If you read, um, I mean, uh, just on Steve Jobs, have you read Becoming Steve Jobs?
0:40:37 I don’t remember. I’ve read about two or three of them. I forget the titles.
0:40:39 I did the Walter Isaacson one.
0:40:44 That one is good, but I think that one is more kind of like pop culture Steve Jobs.
0:40:48 It was not, when I remember reading that and I’m like, I don’t want to be this person.
0:40:49 I don’t like him.
0:40:49 Yeah.
0:40:50 He was very unlikable.
0:40:51 Yeah.
0:40:53 And that book, but what, what was Becoming Steve Jobs?
0:41:01 It, so the central question of it was exam, examining like who he was over the course of
0:41:05 his life. And so it effectively, these were journalists, people who covered him for like
0:41:10 40 years and knew him from when he was like the 20 year old kind of wonder can to, you know,
0:41:15 kind of like end of his life. It came out around the time, I think a few months after the
0:41:19 Isaacson. And I think that they felt similarly that so much of he was portrayed out was,
0:41:23 it was like this brilliant trick. And instead we’re trying to focus of like, how did he change
0:41:27 over the course of his life? And I think it’s an amazing, amazing read because I think it focuses
0:41:34 much more on like him or the lessons or the things that shaped and changed his style. And I would say
0:41:41 like, I super, I really highly recommend that book. There’s other great, great ones too on other
0:41:49 aspects. Like I love insanely simple. I love insanely great Steve Levy. That’s like a lesser read,
0:41:55 but wonderful book just about just like 15 of them. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So chat GPT has become
0:41:59 my life coach. Yeah. And there’s like a prompt where it’s like, I forget exactly what it was,
0:42:06 but it was like, everything you know about me, boil it down to one word. Okay. Uh, and I think
0:42:10 I phrased it where I’m like, tell me like my issue or my flaw. So it was like, it’s going to be negative.
0:42:15 And it, I think I said two words and the first one was jealousy. And the second one was fear,
0:42:20 which are very similar, um, emotions actually, I think, but it was like rooted in like comparing
0:42:25 yourself to other people. Yeah. In New York city, it’s like so easy to do that. And it’s like dialed
0:42:32 up to a 10. You’re strange to me because you seem like such a, you are so successful at such a young
0:42:36 age. And also you seem emotionally stable. Those things typically aren’t the same.
0:42:41 You know what I mean? A little, a little out there. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I find that
0:42:47 unique and interesting about you. Look, I, I’ll like compete very aggressively in, in things that I
0:42:51 believe in, believe in. Don’t pretend to be wrong, but like you look back and you’re having like a shit
0:42:56 day and you’re like, all right, I had a bad morning. What does this affect my afternoon at all? Um,
0:43:02 you know, I’ve got a half a day left. Do I want to make a count or not? And I just think the ability
0:43:09 to just like stop, catch yourself and reset, um, is really important and is increasingly hard as you
0:43:12 kind of get older, but it’s super important. And I think some of it was like early experiences,
0:43:17 like, you know, my older brother growing up and have like these really strong mood swings and all
0:43:21 kinds of things would go on. And he had different kind of like, you know, learning difficulties and
0:43:28 stuff. And, you know, he would take medicine and it would like radically change his mood. And I was
0:43:34 like, I remember as a kid, like that was so jarring and weird. Someone could be like, you know, feel a
0:43:38 certain way and then suddenly, you know, feel differently. It was strange to see. And then, you know,
0:43:44 I, I think as a kid, I don’t think I’d fully process the thought, but I remember, you know, I,
0:43:48 I’d get really mad too. Um, or I’d be going to sleep and I was angry about something. I was like,
0:43:54 oh my, why am I mad? Maybe I could not be mad. Um, uh, does being mad help me, uh, or not?
0:43:58 That’s a, that’s an interesting, very, very introspective philosophical question to ask.
0:44:00 Like, well, why do I feel this way? And do I have to?
0:44:08 Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I, you know, I, I think, um, you know, my brother and I would get in all sorts
0:44:12 of fights who’d, you know, I remember when he like threw like a fork and it went into my leg and stuff
0:44:17 like that. And, you know, we have three boys in a house, like they’re, they’re probably not as fun
0:44:22 as, as, as little girls. They do, uh, more interesting things. And I think my, our parents
0:44:27 would, uh, my mom was really good. It’s like, all right, like, uh, I’m going to sit both of you
0:44:31 down. You’re going to have to go and explain, like, um, you’re going to listen to your brother as he
0:44:36 says why he was mad and you get like pissed and you’d want to go whatever. And you’d be like,
0:44:40 you know, you have to go say, and you say it back to him and then you’re going to say your side and
0:44:43 then he’s going to say it back to you. It’s a super intentional thing to do. It was really,
0:44:47 my parents never would have, they would have been like, you guys just shut up. Yeah. It drove me
0:44:53 off the goddamn wall. But after long enough, is your mom like a, was she like a hippie? Like that’s
0:44:57 strange. Like that, no, that stuff wasn’t like that stuff’s popular now with that’s probably how,
0:45:01 that’s how I’m going to parent my kid. Yeah. But that’s like some gentle parenting,
0:45:06 like hippie dippy shit, which I buy into. I mean, it was, what was her job? Teacher therapist or
0:45:11 something? No, I, she sold like telecommunication, like that’s interesting. Telecom stuff. It’s a very
0:45:15 forward way to parent. Good parenting, I guess, but it teaches you to consider the other side a little
0:45:21 bit. Um, and to, to calm down, you see the complexity of things. And then, you know, later on when you see
0:45:26 something chemically change other people, it’s hard to do it, but you know, it forces you to start
0:45:30 wonder, like, is it me or is it the, you know, something going on in my head that’s making me
0:45:35 feel this way? And, and look, like, I think sometimes stress is good. Other times it’s not.
0:45:41 And I think, you know, ramp is a big company. There’s a lot of pressures and stuff that are
0:45:45 natural. And, you know, I think if you step back and you’re like, all right, um,
0:45:53 how I act, uh, and how I, you know, how you feel can really impact how you think about things.
0:45:59 Um, you know, I, I think I, I, now it’s, it’s much more trained, but you spend a lot of time
0:46:05 just being like, what is the headspace? I don’t regularly. Um, how are you this well balanced?
0:46:09 You read different books too. I mean, it’s now a little more, more trite, but like,
0:46:13 it was funny. I like Ryan holiday stuff when he wrote kind of trust me, I’m lying. But then
0:46:17 you got very into stoic, stoic kind of philosophy to read like meditations and stuff like that. And so
0:46:22 I think you’d pick some of that up. Um, I try to have a day where I just like hang out, just,
0:46:24 I don’t know, go on a run, do different things.
0:46:30 You do clear my head. Yeah. Uh, usually Saturday. Yeah. Usually then. And then Sunday I’ll pick
0:46:35 stuff back up. But I also think too, during your week, like I think, especially with other founders
0:46:41 is life goes on. You were probably really good at something. Um, and you did it a lot and that’s
0:46:44 what allowed you to build this company. Then suddenly you’re running the company and you don’t have time
0:46:49 to do the thing that you really liked anymore. Uh, and I think that a lot of people lose control over
0:46:54 their own week and they don’t actually audit. Like, am I spending the time on things that I’m good
0:47:00 at, um, or not to be, or, or want to be spending the time on. And so, and I pretty regularly try to go
0:47:04 and like blow up my calendar and be like, all right, I actually love doing this thing. Am I spending any
0:47:10 time on it? No. And I promise if you spend your too many weeks in a row doing something you hate,
0:47:15 um, you’re going to be miserable. You’re going to be stressed out. Uh, and so I just redesign my
0:47:19 weeks or months pretty regularly. I, um, it helps.
0:47:24 A question I’ve been asking myself a lot is like, where’s my weakness now? Yeah. And like,
0:47:27 what do I need to like really work on? Yeah. It’s actually, uh, whenever I do reference
0:47:31 checks when people, one of my little tricks is I’ll be like, what’s this person? One out
0:47:35 of 10. And they’re always going to say like eight or nine. Yeah. Everyone says that. And
0:47:41 I’m like, cool. What makes them nine or whatever. Okay. Now to get that extra point, what do they
0:47:44 need to work on? I like this question. That’s where you hear like weaknesses. That’s the only
0:47:49 polite way I’ve been able to get someone to like talk shit on someone is important. I mean,
0:47:53 like, and then like a lot of those weaknesses that they have, I’m like, I could put up with
0:47:57 that. Yeah. Whatever. Um, like if someone’s like, well, they’re really not patient. Like
0:48:04 Oh, okay. That sounds good to me. Whatever. Uh, what flaws or weaknesses do you have now that
0:48:08 you think you have to overcome to get to where you want to be in a decade or two?
0:48:17 So I’ll, I’ll slightly critique the question. Um, which is like, if you’re like a one person
0:48:23 company, this is exactly the right question of like, how can I change, uh, in order to get better?
0:48:29 But if you’re like a 10 person or a thousand person, uh, company, um, or whatever, uh, you are in it,
0:48:37 you’re on a team, you can change or you can change how the team is constructed. Um, is I think
0:48:41 the more interesting way to think about it. And what I’ll tell you, like one of my big flaws,
0:48:47 which is probably very surprising for, um, you know, ramp scale is like, I don’t know if there’s
0:48:54 like a hundred things to do, uh, that are very important to get done. Um, the way my mind works
0:48:57 is like, I’ll start with a blank sheet of paper and I’ll be like, what are the top five or 10 things?
0:49:01 And I’ll like write them down. And then I like forget about the rest and don’t do them.
0:49:05 And like, that’s fine early on when things, there’s like one or two things that matter,
0:49:10 but like, we’ll blow up the company. Um, if you’re just consistently not dealing with 90%
0:49:16 of issues. And one of the things that I do in order to cope with that and compensate for that
0:49:21 is I surround myself with people who are operationally unbelievable, who are incredibly
0:49:28 good at triaging, cascading, getting things done and making things move. Um, and, um, what I would say
0:49:33 is like, it’s actually totally fine to have huge flaws and you could decide to fix them. Or you can
0:49:38 say, I’m actually going to design, you know, my life or the company or whatever to be performant
0:49:45 in that context. Um, and so I think that’s okay. Um, and, and, and I, I, I guess what I, what I would
0:49:51 say is like a lot of the way that we built, um, ramp and, you know, I think about building companies
0:49:54 is a lot of folks kind of look for, you know, what are the things they’re good at? What are the
0:49:59 things they’re bad at? And how do I, you know, identify all the problems? Um, and it’s good to
0:50:05 know about them. I agree. Well, what I’m referring to is like, um, like for example, um, I’m a very
0:50:11 emotional person and like, I like a trick that I’ve been learning. It’s like, it don’t make it. It’s
0:50:14 like, don’t go to the grocery store when you’re hungry. Yeah. Don’t make a big decision when I’m
0:50:19 feeling pissed off about something or, you know, or really happy about something like don’t make
0:50:23 decisions there. So I got, I have to wait or when someone tells me something I don’t like
0:50:30 don’t react, just say, okay, let me think about it. And so my big thing is just like, um, it’s all about
0:50:35 emotional regulation and impulse control. That’s like, that’s what I have to, that’s my big flaw.
0:50:40 And I think I, you, I have to improve that to be a better person. Yeah. And I’m not even referring
0:50:47 to just, um, business. Yeah. But that will impact it positively as well. Yeah. I totally agree with
0:50:50 you. Thanks, dude. That’s the pod. Thanks a lot.
0:50:57 I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days
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