Mm-hmm.

We come back within minutes to help you understand it, and so you can start to go and see, okay, not just this person normally spends, um- Uh, $1,000 a month, but they've already ran through $800 in an hour, and so you can set up notifications.

We show you unusual spikes.

And so again, think back to the early days of, of Ramp and corporate cards.

A lot of this was alerting and visibility.

It's these types of insights, and you also see things like, you know, we know how the, the most efficient companies are running.

Sure

... uh, around what makes Freight efficient.

How do you do it?

There are two things that I'm generally looking for, right? One, I completely agree with Toby.

I think you're trying to look for some evidence of a spike or some level of exceptional drive.

I think that there are many people in certain fields that can be top one percent or point one percent in some field, but most, most are not.

And I think that if folks are, there's usually some evidence to some degree somewhere in the past that you can find.

When I think about a, a couple of these things, uh, you know, I think about there's an engineer, uh, and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp who, uh, we found them because, you know, when they were fifteen years old, they were paying, playing like eighty hours, a hundred hours a week just on Minecraft.

And a few of them were known for building these private Minecraft, uh, servers that were so entertaining, other kids would love to play it.

Can you explain why?

And, and I guess one day maybe your path to an IPO.

Uh, of course.

Well, well, first of all, like y- this is kind of an amazing time to be building a company.

The fast, the, the last time we grew this fast was three years ago when we were 1/20th of this size in terms of an economic scale.

Today, Ramp powers more than 3% of all of the corporate card transactions in America, nearly 1% of all corporate transactions, including bill payments.

And what we do for companies is we help them reduce the amount they spend.

The average company adopting Ramp, and there's over 50,000 of them, are able to reduce their expenses by over 5% per year.

Yeah

Good pick

... of, of Ramp since we were, like, 20 people, um, is gonna be leading the efforts.

Um, uh, grew up there, um, on the board of EQT, and, uh, I think so many members of our team are focused, uh, on not just going and selling things locally, but being a part of the local fabric of, uh, how, uh, the economy works, uh, and doing it right.

So, um, we're, we're quite excited.

Mm-hmm

... uh, turns out last year, the average, uh, business on Ramp grew their revenue by 16%, which is multiple times faster than the US average.

Uh, we know businesses in Europe wanna do this, too.

Um, you...

Is that the same in Europe, or is it a different, uh, industry there?

In many ways, it's very consistent.

I, I would say whether it's the US or even in Europe, classically, if you were a bank, you were able to move money, and if you weren't, you could sell weird aftermarket software to do your expenses or pay your bills or things like that.

And the result was probably what most people still feel of, you know, uh, one hour a month you have the worst hour, uh, slowly doing your expenses across different systems.

And part of what we proved out in the US is it doesn't have to be so hard.

Uh, you know, we've created, uh, cards where you, you tap them and your expense report is done for you, your books are closed for you, and the result, uh, is that companies spend less.

The average business spends about 5% less, uh, and the average business on Ramp, uh, grew last year by about 16%, which is multiple times the US average.

And now, i- you know, is this kind of therefore about, like, the multinational client that you're trying to go after?

And so are companies at some level incurring some tech debt now where they are adding a bunch of code, which will maybe be harder to reason with later? Or do you just get bailed out by the models getting better?

It's really interesting.

By the way, one of the other interesting kind of sub-conversations I'm hearing a lot too is when you think about where tech debt comes from, there's a set of conditions and trade-offs you make.

You write things in a kind of a discrete and deterministic way.

Under these circumstances, follow this code path.

Under these circumstances, follow this other one.

In a world where there's LLMs and kind of the models themselves are improving, I think it's entirely possible that the way that code is written is you say, here's what I'm solving for.

What does the spend data that Ramsey used tell us about the economy? I

Mm.

... uh, "on who will be the most searched people of the year," uh, including, uh, yeah, just, like, whether or not Pope Leo will rank, uh, in Google's top five most searched people."

This is a weird one.

Uh, Darren Rovell says, "This is what happens/what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated." Here's the thing, they are regulated by the CFTC.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so this is...

You know, at over a billion dollars a year in revenue, uh, the business is doubling.

Uh, it's generating cash.

And if you look at gross profits specifically, which is a good metric of how efficient, uh, are the underlying mechanics of the business, uh, we're growing 10 times faster than the median publicly traded software company.

So, it's just in a category of its own.

I think on top of this, uh, AI has just been an incredible accelerant, uh, for the business itself.

Yeah.

And so the question is, is that a standard term that employees should be willing to accept? Or is that something you might want to have only for founders that are raising venture capital money? Your take.

Six is definitely abnormal.

Uh, I would say market standard is, a four-year vest is fairly typical.

Um, there are companies that diverge from it.

Like, I think probably the most, you know, the extremes on one end, you'd see six on, or you could see like even, I think like the Stripes of the world have.

E- every year you get a- an extra tranche of, of, uh, RSUs that vest over a 12-month period, which is a one-year kind of vest and every year they kind of re-underwrite, uh, where you are.

It's not as speculative as a earlier stage company, to your point, Alex.

What I, what I would say ultimately is in some sense, a six-year can be good, right? If you believe the value of the shares are going to multiply.

Can you catch that? Like, how are you thinking about blocking AI initiatives that when it's harder and harder to prove if something's real, like an expense?

There's a variety, a variety of ways.

So first, um, you know, I, when, when, um, it was earlier this year, it was one of the newer, uh, GPT-4 models came out and suddenly it was clear, it was very easy for people to go and generate AI, AI receipts.

Uh, we partnered with the leading labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, first to create detection systems, but we have a, a r- a repository of over 100 million, uh, receipts that we can look at of valid receipts.

And so we actually have systems that, you know, we're using AI to fight AI, um, to go and block, uh, these transactions.

It's something regular systems can't do.

And next, because we have multiple sources of truth, we have the card and merchant data, we have the image data, we have the receipt data with the accounting data, we are much better than single systems like maybe, uh, Expensify or Concur where you just get an image, and that's the only thing you have to go on.

if, if all goes to plan, do they need a human resources department even eventually? A lot of the core business functions operations, like, is that the, the grand vision?

Before you go into this thing, what about the Ramp? Wh- what, what are you using tokens for at Ramp? Are you using it to identify spend and categorize it?

That is exactly it.

You know, I think one of the t- very tedious areas of work for companies is, let's say you've, you've gone, you've, you've booked that flight or hotel, you've, you know, paid for that SaaS subscription.

Uh, there's a lot of work that goes in to go and get that receipt, um, go, you know, um, uh, put it into clean, readable t- um, uh, form, and then put it into your accounting software.

You usually have controllers, finance, uh, folks, accountants kind of tagging these.

So it's very tedious and monotonous.

Um, and our, um, you know, today Ramp is not only faster but more accurate, um, you know, really than, uh, almost all accountants, um, you know, using the platform.

(laughs)

Yup.

Right? And so as we look over, uh, over the years, that's gone up a lot.

And i- i- if, uh, if you joined in 2023, um, you know, mathematically, we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the me- metric is as you did just two years ago, um, for every minute you're spending on the site.

So, it's all to say, like, every minute is counting for three times more.

I think that ratio should be 30 times more.

Yeah.

... you know, on, like, for Ben Thompson, like, what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better? And when I think of, like, what is that last exam, uh, ultimately for a finance organization is, you know, I, I think there are companies that have taken these tests.

So, I think one of the interesting studies that I think about is, um, Amazon.

Yeah.

These systems, one, they're in- incredibly complicated to do each of those things.

And so I, I actually think, like, brilliant people have, over the last 50, 100 years been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases, like, tabulators just calculating things or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over, or matching the receipts and doing like very low level task and only doing a little bit, you know, after you finally look back.

Yeah.

... you know, on like, for Ben Thompson.

Like, what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better? And when I think of, like, what is that last exam, uh, ultimately for a finance organization is, you know, I, I think there are companies that have taken these tests.

So, I think one of the interesting studies that I think about is, um, Amazon.

Uh, in its early days, um, their, uh, s- so they were very early and they would send email follow-ups to customers, "You just bought this." And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write, like, if you've seen, like, the Trader Joe's newsletter-

Mm-hmm.

... um, computers, things that are usually some leading indicators about how bullish companies are.

Um, but if you look month by month, companies are tending to actually spend more.

And so still optimistic, but I, I, I think that the other big thing that's really top of mind for folks and, and, and we take really seriously is almost where you started.

Um, uh, where I think every...

Certainly, the Valley companies are being asked by their boards, "What are you doing about AI?" But, you know, this is true of, of, of small businesses, of, of old school enterprises, you name it.

And I, I think that for most of the 40,000 businesses we serve, um, they don't have a single software engineer, uh, let alone a, a, an engineer working just for their finance teams.

Yeah.

I, I'm sure that that sort of, like, long-term thinking around partnership with, uh, the government has dri- driven a lot of your decision-making.

Oh, for sure.

I mean, look, it's, um...

I mean, maybe a couple things.

I mean, first, I, I, I actually just think there's, like, a very...

I, I think some of the story of technology, uh, I, I think about, you know, Steve Jobs' old famous quote of, you know, "A computer is almost like a bicycle for the mind."

Mm-hmm.

... departments of, of, of whether it's like it's education, interior, there, there's people doing important work.

So one that makes a sales call, so what are, what are they using AI for?

So one of the most important functions and the first role for anyone going into sales is this role called a sales development rep, and the job of that person is book meetings.

Find people out there who maybe are doing expense reports the old way, and let's bring them in.

And if you kind of decompose what that task actually is, it's first asking, "Who are these businesses? What is a relevant moment? Have they just raised funds? Have they just hired someone on their finance team?" Maybe they're posting an open role and some needs.

There are these signals out there in the world.

Then you notice, okay, you've got your lead list assembled.

You have to go write them.

Hmm.