How Eric Glyman Built Ramp Into a $16 Billion Dollar Company In Only 6 Years

**Eric Glyman** (0:00)
The world was built by people no smarter than you. Building a business is being a business of problem solving. You're gonna have all sorts of issues, you're gonna deal with things, be put in scenarios that you didn't anticipate, and you have to figure it out. When you think about building a business, you learn pretty quickly that the biggest battle of a startup is people not caring.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:16)
You guys ran into a little bit of a problem, some cease and desist letters, and you've had all this growth, you're feeling great, and then that's probably like an oh shit moment, when you dropped revenue potentially 80% overnight.

**Eric Glyman** (0:26)
You're going through hell, keep going.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:27)
Yeah.
Okay, so I'm here with Eric, founder of Ramp, hosting me at his beautiful New York office. Thank you so much for allowing me to take away your precious time. I want to talk to you a little bit about your founder journey, man. How it's been? How'd you got here?

**Eric Glyman** (0:43)
Oh my God. Well, it got out of bed. No, I'm kidding. Thank you so much for honestly flying and being here in New York City. It means a lot to me.

**Wouter Teunissen** (0:52)
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for hosting me. I think this is going to be a lot of fun and hopefully the listeners can get a lot of value out of it. I know I did just doing the research, so this is going to be fun. I want to start off by talking about Vegas. So your dad, a doctor, right? He moves to Vegas. What was that like growing up there for 18 years? I know there was a lot of expansion during your, you know, when you grew up there. So what was that like?

**Eric Glyman** (1:14)
So I was born in 1990 You know, I look back and I think there was about 500,000 people, something like that in Las Vegas area. When I left for college, there's about 2 million. It's insane. And so a lot of my memory of just growing up there was...

**Wouter Teunissen** (1:29)
There was more people.

**Eric Glyman** (1:30)
There was more people, there was new parts of town all the time, you know, and no one was quite from there, you know, which was, which was interesting. You had to, you felt like you got to know something about the world. You met people from all the way around the world. And, you know, I didn't realize how unusual it was then, but cousins would visit, family, everyone wanted a reason to come into Las Vegas. But in many ways, you know, there was parts when I left for college and came back, I realized I had a bit of a weird childhood, you know, you feel like home and you hear the ringing of the slot machines and you see ads for people in very little clothing on billboards and there's things that are unusual. But, you know, there was, you know, I think when I look back at my childhood and just one of the things that I remember that I later realized was very different was, you know, you could meet people who built things. You know, I didn't know necessarily a lot of people who built the casinos and the new malls and construction, but that was a normal thing for people to do, which, you know, I don't know that every other, growing up in other places, that's normal, but that stuck with me.

**Wouter Teunissen** (2:38)
Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I definitely, I don't know of any other cities that grow that quickly in that sort of a time span.

**Eric Glyman** (2:42)
Sure, for sure.

**Wouter Teunissen** (2:44)
Your first job, you started working at Express. Talk to me about that experience, and then we can sort of relate that into, you know, you going to college, but talk to me about Express.

**Eric Glyman** (2:53)
Yeah, 100%. So, you know, it has evolved quite a bit since then, but one of these early kind of fast fashion brands, you know, very basic stuff, and I liked it because I could make, you know, $8.50 an hour, something like that. And, you know, when you're 18, that makes a big difference.
And I liked it. I actually think anyone, you know, wants to build anything. I think working at some part of service is, there's no replacement for it, whether it's a, you know, restaurant or selling clothes or something. But you meet all kinds of people. Some you normally encounter, many you wouldn't. And your job is to, you know, help them have a great experience, buy clothes that they're going to fall in love with. And it turns out selling is not as easy as you think. And so you learn a lot.