I built a billion dollar company in 18 months

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Can you build a billion-dollar company in only 18 months? Today's guest, his name is Eric Glyman. He's a buddy of mine who started a company called Ramp. And him and his co-founder, they asked themselves this question before they started the company. They wanted to get to a billion-dollar valuation in only 18 months, and they reverse-engineered it. And I'd heard him tell this story before, but he didn't really give a lot of details on it, and I thought it was amazing. The fact that they were this bold, and then they actually pulled it off. So the company is worth something like $20 billion now, and they're only, I think, six years old. And so give this episode a listen. Let me know what you think. Again, Eric Glyman of RAMP is on today's episode of My First Million. You said something that was pretty crazy. It was, I wanna build a billion dollar company in 18 months.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:52)
In 18 months, yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:54)
And that was kind of shocking, because that's like crazy fast. That's crazy fast. Is that really what happened? You guys had that conversation?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:01)
Yeah, that's a real conversation.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:03)
You guys didn't have, you and Kareem, were you on the same page?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:06)
We wanted to go fast, for sure. I think the world is moving faster than ever. We had already sold our first company, and we were definitely, neither of us came for a whole lot. We were comfortable. And I think even at the time, had already proven a couple things out, and in some sense had left.
I was a 26 year old senior director of Capital One. I think I was the youngest person at that age. We left very good set ups. And so we knew that if we wanted to leave, we wanted to go and make this company big, and either make it huge quickly or fail really quickly. And so yeah, Kareem really did have that conversation. I think he had it with Calvin, who later, he cracked me up. I think when we finally did become a billion dollar company, and it did occur in 2021 And so it was less than two years from incorporation of the company.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:56)
No shit, wait, two years after incorporation?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:58)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:59)
That's insane.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
Yeah, it was crazy. You know, a lot of magical things happened in 2021, but it really did happen. And Calvin said, you know, look, it's best not to know the odds. You know, if I had looked it up and known, I would have seen that there was no company in New York's history ever that was worth a billion dollars within 18 months or two years or three. But yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:19)
What was your revenue when you did that?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:20)
I mean, in 2021, geez, that was, you gotta remember, this was like peak excitement in the market. I think we started that year maybe around 10 million in revenue, probably less.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Which was six months into the company, you're at a 10 million run rate?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:37)
So let me back up. We incorporated the company in March of 2019 We launched it publicly in February of 2020 The pandemic hit, things slowed down, then ramp just started real accelerating. I think that year revenue grew something like 70 times year over year, to the point where, a small denominator, but we had hit, it was approaching 10 million a year before the company was out for even a year. And by the end of 2021, again, I think the multiples really hadn't changed too much, but the company ended with an $8.1 billion valuation and we were coming up to, but hadn't yet crossed 100 million year revenue. It was a crazy year.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:21)
So, how many years until, how many months until 100 million run rate?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:25)
We were one of the fastest ever. I mean, so if you go back to it, we, I think, announced it, I want to say in March of 2022, I think is when Paci McCormick discovered the company deeply, become a very good friend, I think wrote the article talking about it, as well as the $8.1 billion valuation. I believe that was in March of 22 We launched in Feb of 2020, I think we hit our first million run rate sometime in the spring, maybe by early summer. And so if you look at the traditional charts, it's now become a bit of a meme of like time from a million to a hundred million in revenue. Our chart's actually wrong, that's from like time from incorporation. I want to say like 15 to 17 months from a million to a hundred million. It was explosive.