20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci

**George Bonaci** (0:00)
I think the way that you find Alpha, is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part is important. I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business is far, far more important.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:20)
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to discuss how they scaled their incredible businesses. Today, we have George Bonaci, VP of Growth at Ramp, where he's helping one of the fastest growing fintech companies scale even faster. Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong. And before Gong, George was at Samsara, where he helped grow revenue from 100 million to 650 million ARR and played a pivotal role in the company's successful IPO. But before we dive into the show today, Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast growing businesses, including NASDAQ, AngelList, Doodle and Coda, trust Secure Frame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards, such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, NIST standards and more. Backed by top tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes' list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024, G2's best software awards for higher satisfaction products and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more today at secureframe.com. And speaking of speed, let's talk about something every founder, product leader and CEO is thinking about. Innovation. We all know that innovation is the lifeblood of any company, yet more than 80% of innovation projects stall before they even make it to execution. Why is that? Because once teams move from discovery to development, outdated processes, endless contact switching and misalignment slow everything down. Don't you hate it when that happens? Well, that's exactly why Miro built the Innovation Workspace. God, that's a cool name. A faster, smarter way to take ideas to execution. Now, at 20VC, we've worked with countless startup founders who know that speed is everything. And that's where AI-powered tools like Miro's come in.
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**George Bonaci** (2:57)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:00)
George, I'm so excited for this dude. Ramp is one of my favorite companies to feature. I've heard so many great things about you. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

**George Bonaci** (3:09)
No, thank you so much for having me.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:10)
Listen, as we just said, I know a show is going to be great when I actually have to do very little work because you give me such great suggestions. You said to me before, growth is just science and most marketers are bad at science. What did you mean by that statement?

**George Bonaci** (3:26)
The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business. And usually like early on, that's very top of funnel focused. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has predictable outputs given some inputs? And the honest answer is like, no one really knows. Every business is different. So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked, usually just taking like that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company like generally doesn't work. And I think that's the tendency of a lot of marketers. So when I say that like growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis and then run a bunch of experiments. And you'll be surprised about what works. You'll be surprised at what doesn't work. But ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll find something that's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here?