Eric Glyman - Reimagining Corporate Finance

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:48)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:13)
My guest today is Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of RAMP. RAMP is best known for its corporate cards but it has a range of software products to help finance teams save time and money. The business has grown rapidly since its founding in 2019 and was last valued at $8 billion. Eric and I discussed RAMP's initial marketing wedge, how the business has dealt with such fast growth and why they hold stable coins on their balance sheet. Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Glyman.
Eric, I'd love to begin our conversation by hearing what this industry that you're building in was like when you first approached it. Like what were the things looking back on the early days that were most notably awry about the existing incumbent solutions that motivated you to want to build a company here in the first place?

**Eric Glyman** (2:59)
Happy to go into it right away. I mean, so Ramp is a relatively young company and it's stark how quickly things have changed. So we incorporated in March of 2019 And I think the theme of not just the year, the day, the decade, frankly, was one of excess. The way to compete in the credit card industry, which is our first flagship product was buy our card. We've got amazing signup bonuses.
We might have great lounges for you too. We've got points and rewards. We understand you uniquely. It was very marketing forward.
It was very centered around EOXS, metal cards, black cards, all these kinds of things. It was very much the idea of what credit cards could be and what they represented.
What was strange to me about this was first, I had a funny purview too. I had a company focused on savings, it was bought by Capital One. My job was to ask people what they were looking for. It turned out it wasn't points, it wasn't cash back. It was more in their bank account.
Next, when we started talking with finance teams, they weren't looking for points or sign up bonuses. These were marginal differences. It didn't fundamentally change the outcomes of businesses. They were looking for more control. They were looking to be more profitable. They were looking to go of them earlier. It felt there was a large and fundamental misalignment where the large-scale credit card issuers were thinking a lot about how to get people to spend more money, earn more points, show off the brand. Whereas most business owners, people operating companies, were more simple, straightforward, and actually wanted to be more successful to do what they actually cared about. And it felt like business owners, the customers, wanted something different than what the core partners was. I would say it started with the fundamental misalignment that got us very curious and obsessed with, or eventually led into this focus on helping business owners spend less money, spend less time.