Ep 166: Eric Glyman on Ramp's Meteoric Growth, Selling Outcomes vs Products, and the Future of White-Collar Work

Eric Glyman (0:00)

There's probably a trillion dollars of work towards jobs that I think are beneath people's potential. About a year ago this time, the entire world was spending on the order of $30 billion a year on inference across the major labs. Today, estimates are something closer to $150 to $170 billion.

In other words, the amount spent on AI is equal to about 2% of all white-collar wages.

Joe Lonsdale (0:29)

You are now over 2 billion revenue run rate.

Eric Glyman (0:31)

It's growing over 100% per year, growing faster this year than it did last year.

Joe Lonsdale (0:35)

You've described Ramp as a proactivity company that happens to move money.

Eric Glyman (0:38)

A typical business running on Ramp is able to cut their expenses by about 7.5% per year. I think a lot of companies get stuck in this idea of we're going to go sell you a product. They forget really at best companies should be selling outcomes.

Joe Lonsdale (1:00)

Eric Glyman is the CEO of Ramp. He has over $2 billion run rate growing over 100%.

One of the top AI teams in the AI world today with over 2,000 people. How do they build this business? Let's hear from him about what it means to focus on outcomes, to focus on aligning with your customers and solving your customers problems, instead of trying to sell them stuff. How does Eric run a company with 2,000 people, with tons of top AI talent? He has these really small teams he manages. Let's hear from him and see what it looks like inside of an AI champion. Eric, thanks for joining.

Eric Glyman (1:29)

Joe, couldn't be happier to be here. It's a ton of fun.

Joe Lonsdale (1:31)

Eric, you are, I guess, now over 2 billion revenue run rate. I guess maybe that's secret. You're growing over 100%, crushing it. This is an amazing company. Let's go back to the beginning. I think you and Karim had already built and sold Paribus when you decided to start Ramp.

Eric Glyman (1:44)

What did you do before?

Joe Lonsdale (1:45)

What was that company?

Eric Glyman (1:47)

Paribus, now the idea is much more popular, but it was a prehistoric AI agent, is how I would describe it. The premise was, let's say you bought something online, let's say a TV, and it dropped in price a week after you bought it. Stores, Amazon, Best Buy, whatever, would guarantee that you get the difference in price if you'd ask them.

We built an app that would ask for you. You would link it to your Gmail, it would scan your inbox for receipts, structure the data. If you were eligible, just wrote an email to them, stores would respond and you'd wake up to the difference, and we'd charge a percentage.

Joe Lonsdale (2:16)

What did you learn from that experience? What did you guys learn building that?

Eric Glyman (2:19)

Well, one, it helps to have a really simple, easy to understand value proposition. Stores owe you money, we're going to go get it for you.

Having very aligned incentives, that was super helpful. A lot of the learning truly that picked up and led into ramp happened post-acquisition. It was a very fast process. We launched in May of 2015, a year later we had sold. And Capital One, which bought the company and wanted to scale us from a million users to 10X more, put us in the credit card division. When we were there, we really got a deep lesson in how financial institutions work, what make them great and very profitable. But I also got a deep education and incentives in actually how does it affect what people really do.

We found an organization that said good things, but somehow people were working to grow the amount that people spent on their cards. Then there was other teams trying to grow net margins. Sometimes it meant convince people the points were worth a lot. And then there was another division that would go devalue the points.

Joe Lonsdale (3:26)

They try to make more money.

Eric Glyman (3:27)

Try to make more money. We were in the savings division, and so we'd call customers and ask them, we had to sell cards too. We'd ask them, what do you want? Do you want points, cash back, something different? And if you really listen to people, people would say, I actually just want more of my bank account.

And we're like, huh, if you really think through that and you help people not spend $100 on some subscription that they're paying for but forgot about, no longer using, cancel that. At the end of the month, that's $99 more in their account than if they got like a dollar back on that purchase. And we got obsessed with this idea of like, why isn't there a card or software design to help you go and spend less? But I think that financial institutions, a lot of organizations are filled with these misaligned incentives. You know, from the bank that could pay you more interest, maybe they have a higher year-link savings account, but they don't want to tell you about it.