Ramping Up

**Packy McCormick** (0:18)
The Be Monday, and welcome to Not Boring.
Third time is a charm here. When R.A.M.P.'s CEO, Eric Glyman, called a couple months ago to let me know that they were raising a round, and to ask if I'd want to write about it, my initial reaction was, let me think about it. I'd never written about a company other than RAMP twice, let alone three times. But then Eric and I got to talking about updates and growth and the new things they were working on, and how the round came together, and all the little details that go into making the RAMP story so compelling. Less than a year after writing about RAMP there's still a much bigger story to tell.
By the numbers, when I wrote about RAMP in December 2020, the company had just passed $100 million in transaction volume, money spent on its cards. Today, it's announcing that it just crossed a $100 million revenue run rate. It was worth $250 to $300 million then, it's worth $8.1 billion now. Plus, there's something fascinating about following one company through its journey from the early days into an octagon. I'm so sorry. That's set to become one of those all-time special ones. And it wouldn't be a ramp story without insiders doubling and tripling down whenever they get the chance. Ramp is a portfolio company, but this is not a sponsored deep dive. It's just a snapshot in time of one of the companies I appreciate the most and a look ahead at what it might do in the future. Before we get to ramp though, a word from the sponsor of all the audio editions of our Not Boring essays, Masterworks.
Last week, Apecoin, the governance token of the Board Ape Yacht Club made a huge splash. As expected, it's been pretty volatile. It's currently down 62% from its eyes around $10 a coin. Although the use case for Ape is fascinating, volatility isn't for everyone. So if you're looking for an alternative investment that's legit, SEC registered, and less volatile than most cryptocurrencies, you should look at Bluechip Art. Now, I don't need to tell you how high I am on art investing. I do every week. And when I'm not deep in the weeds trying to find the next people, I invest in multimillion dollar art with masterworks.io.
masterworks.io has registered over 100 paintings with the SEC and have analyzed over 5 million data points to find quality works for you. Since 2017, they've sold three paintings, each realizing a net annualized gain of over 30%. Although past performance is no indicator of future results, I do think that they know what they're doing. So if you want to invest in world famous artists like Picasso, Keith Haring and Banksy with me, then you should head over to masterworks.io/ not boring to get exclusive access. That's masterworks.io/ not boring. And you can see important disclosures at masterworks.io/disclaimer. Now let's get to it. Ramping up.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 They weren't the first people to create a search engine, or even the 10th. Yahoo was born in 1994 But Google's PageRank algorithm generated better search results than competitors. And in 2000, AdWords, their intent-based advertising system, gave their better product a much better business model. Google put itself in the right place at the right time to direct people's attention and dollars across the internet, and charged businesses an auction-based fee for sending the people looking for what they were selling. A quarter century later, Google's search advertising business is probably the greatest money printing machine ever known to humankind.
But in a piece full of effusive praise from all corners, allow me to set the tone. Ramp has the potential to build an even better business than Google.
Ramp is not the first corporate card or even the 10th, but it's the best corporate card company at building technology and the best technology company with a corporate card. It's also the first to try to help its customers spend less, an important distinction in the future I think it's building.
This is the third time I've written about Ramp, and I didn't understand the parallels with Google until now. There's a very good chance I'm being overly optimistic, but here's the logic. Google built a monster business by owning the search layer. When people want to find something, they go to Google, and Google can send them to the right place. Advertisers pay the fee each time someone clicks. At some point in the future, automation will overtake manual purchases. That transition will happen in business spend first. Businesses are more likely to buy based on specs than individuals are.
Ramp has the opportunity to own the transaction layer for businesses. When businesses spend money, a more than $100 trillion market, Ramp can monetize via interchange as it does today, but it can also suggest better places to spend or even automatically redirect spend and take an affiliate cut or financing revenue when appropriate.