I built a billion dollar company in 18 months

can you build a billion dollar company in only eighteen months today's guest his name is erica ay he's a buddy of mine who started a company called ramp and him and his cofounder they asked themselves this question before they started the company they wanted to get to a billion dollar valuation in only eighteen months and they reverse engineered it and i'd heard him tell this story before but he didn't really like 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 twenty billion dollars now and they're only i think six years old and so give us episode to listen let me know what you think again erica of ramp is on today's episode of my first million i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looked you said something that was like pretty crazy it was i wanna i wanna build a billion dollar company in eighteen in eighteen months yeah and that was kind of shocking because that's like great i mean that's crazy fast is that really what happened you guys had that conversation yeah that's real conversation that you guys didn't have you and cream were go on the same page we we wanna go fast for sure you know i think like the world is moving fast and ever we had already sold their first company and we were definitely like neither of us came for a whole lot we were comfortable and you know i think even at the time had already proven a a couple things out and you know in some sense had left like i was i was a twenty six year old you know senior director or of capital one i think it's like the youngest person at that that age like we left very good setups and so we knew that if we wanted to leave we wanted to go and make this company big and either make a huge quickly or fail really quickly and so yeah kareem really did have that conversation i think he had with calvin who you know later it he cracked me up i i think when we finally did become a billion dollar company and it did occur in in twenty twenty one and so it was less than two years from incorporation of the of the company no shit wait two years after incorporation yeah that's insane yeah who's crazy you know a lot a lot of magical things happened in twenty twenty one but it it really did happen i know calvin said you know looks something is it's best not to know the odds you know i looked it up and no and i would have seen that there was no company in new york history ever that was worth billion dollars within eighteen months or two years or three but yeah bullish your revenue when you when you did that i mean in twenty twenty one jeez that was you got remember this was like peak excitement of the market i think we started that year maybe around ten million in in revenue probably less so which was six months into the company you're at a ten million run rate so let let let me let me back it yeah we incorporated the company in march of twenty nineteen and we launched it publicly in february of twenty twenty the pandemic kit things slow down then ramped just started really accelerating i think that year revenue grew something like seventy times year over year to the point where any small denominator there but we had hit it was it was approaching ten million a year before the company was out for even a year and by the end of twenty twenty one again i think the multiples really hadn't changed too much but the company ended with an eight point one billion dollar valuation and we were coming up to you but hadn't yet crossed a hundred million year revenue it was a crazier year so how many years until how many months until a hundred million run rate we were one of the fastest ever i mean so if you go back to it we i think announced it i wanna say in march of twenty twenty two i think is when pac mccormick it's covered the company deeply become a very good friend i think we're wrote the article talking about it as well as that one billion dollar valuation i believe that was in march of of twenty two we launched in feb of twenty twenty i think we hit her first you know million run rate sometime in the spring maybe by early summer and so if you look at the traditional charts there's it's now become a bit of a meme of like time from a million to a hundred million in revenue our charts actually wrong and that's for like time from incorporation i wanna say like fifteen to seventeen months from a million to hundred million it was explosive that's insane and like i don't even know i don't know anything about the finance industry or or i don't even know anything about your guys business model other than i use it yeah like i know everything about personal finance apps i huge nerd in that but i don't even know how like i you you you take a percentage of of spend i imagine but i even understand explain to me how that works you know i didn't know anything about it either until i sold last company to capital one and and and learn the business model and so in in in services there's is is particularly in the the card space there's two basic business model cards the credit cards the the two basic ways that they that they tend to make money number one is a transaction based model where there's this thing called interchange every time a card is swipe there's series of payments the merchant rightfully so gets the the lion's share and then folks involved in moving the money take a little bit a little bit goes to let's say the merchant processor the people who accept the cards routed and deal with all the an example of that company that'd be like a skype or square maybe a shopify they take a huge percentage right so they collect it but they don't keep a huge percentage got it so you might see headline on some of these sites you know two point nine percent plus forty cents or something like that at the very end of the day they might keep you know it varies anywhere from like point one to point five percent is ultimately their net take but the gross is much higher because they're collecting they've also paid the networks well we'll save have a few folks involved they have the the merchant bank so you as a customer have banks that's the you know it's deposited to some bank which maybe you keep it there or you move it to your your business's bank account they'll keep a little bit maybe ten cents visa or a mastercard they'll keep a little bit too call it like point one to point four percent and then the remainder tends to go to the issuer and the issuer processor that's generally the people that you think of as like people's name is on your card it could be like a chase or it could be like a ramp or something like that or a capital one if you have a capital one card or wells fargo if you have that kind of a card and so the issuer in interchange is traditionally keeping most of that interchange and and the reasons actually make sense when you think about it you know especially in credit they're taking on the risk they're saying that merchant we will pay you you know even if our customer doesn't pay us back when you accept this payment you were getting you were getting paid for and if the customer later defaults that's on us and so they're generally taking the credit risk they have the operational costs of standing up the card programs and actually classically if if you look historically these rate used to be very high a lot of these came from like the old department stores in the early nineteen hundreds where you'd have like a bank setup shop actually in the department stores and interchange could be high as five percent or six percent eighteen months saying at a hundred million in revenue how many employees did you have somewhere between a hundred and two hundred to dude so i don't that's just like bog my mind because my company is i think two years old and we're small or it's a bootstrap company we own the whole thing and so i think we have fifteen or eighteen people but when you're doing everything yourself as a blue bootstrap company just like getting one or two hires a month is hard i'm sure at para you're feeling the same thing where yeah just like the logistics of getting that many people yes just the day to day like does everyone have a computer that's incredibly challenging so that's ten people a month that you need to do that yeah it's kind of challenging to understand how how fast that is i mean now we're over eleven hundred people there can be single you know two week periods when we have forty to fifty people that start you know as i i totally agree with you you definitely need great software and you know even to the point that you you had said earlier like you use ramp it don't don't totally understand exactly how it we're how all this stuff works i think there is in any business so much complexity in going and starting a company and operating and scaling it and i think there's an entire class tool tools that tend to be great business models in some of the fastest growing companies over the last few years have actually been that you know you can look at like a ramp in the card space is we're just doing it's allowing you to scale up and down with full control full visibility all your expenses manage your accounting manager gun you don't need to think about it in hr and payroll rip is a great example where you i think that they're eight years old i think they're last round rip lang you know an h h eight years old they're eight years old they started in this school i was one of the first customers i mean maybe twenty sixteen maybe nine but you know they're they're they're not that old and i think they're last round i wanna say was at seventeen billion isn't insane right yeah there's a lot of these tools hubspot you know you you you mentioned them like they're an incredible company that takes what used to be there's lots of little paper cuts that generally need to deal with as a business owner and abstract those away and so i think kind of these boring business models can actually be very good i think i've been able to grow into some of like my success a bit because this happens a little bit slower yeah when you're thirty two years old or whatever and you have two hundred people or you have this valuation or whatever like that it's a little bit overnight feeling did you have like weird feelings of like a self actual of like oh my god all i what i wanted is actually here this fast and i don't know if i'm actually ready to step into that position of or have this responsibility no there's always like impostor syndrome and you know you know i and i and i would say so so there are a couple things i mean we from early on design the company explicitly around velocity if you kinda step back and and sort of look at the the the particular industry that we're playing in not a joke most of the founders of the companies that we compete with actually wore top hats you know they they you know looked in the you know what it means you know like james pier morgan yeah henry wells like you know you you you look at the people who started am max city chase you know nothing wrong with with these these businesses in fact there's a lot to love about them they're enormous businesses but you know a lot of their fundamental edges were in long time enduring brands unbelievable distribution risk and underwriting the benefits of scale and of time but all of them move very slowly and i think in analogy i like to use sometimes is like you know imagine that you wake up one day and you have to use like the computer or like the cell phone technology or like the tools that your parents used when they were your age it'd be very like you couldn't do this podcast it'd be very hard to run your business in that way if you woke up and you had to use their bank account or their credit card or or debit card you probably could you know not too bad and and i think it's sort of proof of like not too much innovation has happened and the products haven't fundamentally evolved over the past thirty forty years is you know from you know no phones to flip phones to computers that can think and so a lot of our view was early on we needed to count the days and move an incredible velocity and simply be designed to ship things faster and so today we're two thousand three hundred and ten days old we're six years yeah that's insane by the way you just said that yeah do you know the day i mean that's just like a a radical thing it's you know i and i remember in the early days when you go back to that eighteen months sat you were we were talking about at the beginning you know we were like hell bent on okay within forty five days we wanna be approved by the network within sixty we wanna be approved by our bank within seventy we wanna be you know funding our first transactions we wanna get this product in front of customers as fast as possible and so a lot of what we're were trying to do is just move very quickly we could set goals if we wanted to grow the company ten percent a week you know once you got the scale twenty percent of month people out it's very intense you don't have this typical personality types like usually people who succeed as fast as you have are very very high on the disagreeable scale yeah you seem pretty easy to get along and you're very calm i don't understand like how that personality type has like i've been able to grow this my view is like i i don't i'm not trying to find folks who are you know low cost you know push them to an extreme burn them out i would rather find people who like just find extreme joy in their craft and just set them up where they can be doing just that as much as possible all the time but i think that you have to if you wanna move quickly you can't do everything there's only one or two things you can pick and you try to have like extreme focus as a company on that and just having an every day trying to just ask like what are the things we can do to optimize just this one function alright so i've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and i've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year and so i have a little bit of experience launching building creating new things and i actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas instead what i'm really really good at what my skill set is is researching different ideas different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies and i did invent this by the way we this guy brad jacobs we talked him about him on the podcast he started like four or five different publicly traded companies where tens of billions of dollars each he actually is the one who i learned how to do this from and so with the team at hubspot we put together all of my research tactics frameworks techniques on spotting different opportunities in a market reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks and so if you wanna see my framework you can check it out the link is below in the youtube description what business we're gonna start instead of ramp so you had just sold pair is it par airbus yeah have you ever said how much money did you make off that we even i mean talked about it publicly but it was mid eight figures you eat walked away with that no that was the total deal the total but we hadn't raised very much i mean we had there's three of y'all it it was it was really kurt truman and i you know then and but we had raised something like two million dollars at the time and so there were some investors but most of it went to founders and in place so it was enough that you're like i'm good potentially good for forever depending on how i live but i i've enough so you're sitting around and you're like at capital one doing your thing what was your list of ideas that you guys were like scheming on where you're like it could be this it could be this what if it was this in this angle like what was that list so i think everyone has a list do go exactly you go through all these different phases so the first year we were just dead set on these people just changed their lives we wanna make sure that they feel incredibly good actually about this deal so the first year we actually didn't spend too much time at all you know we wanted to go and make sure there wasn't failure to launch like we didn't get crushed kinda by the weight of joining this fifty thousand person company in that that so you're just being a good seller yeah which i i think is good but but sort of like underrated kind of the value of like integrity relationships or you know you know that was important to me when i sold too hundred percent i was like i remember thinking i think they got the better of the deal this for that but i was like you know i'm happy but i'm also i kind of want to have a reputation as someone who yeah it was we all won we all win exactly right and i i am more flag like for folks are like young and you know the value of like a great reference of people saying like the world small man it's so small and so that was that was the first year i i think the second we start saying okay this is interesting but you know i missed the speed yeah you know i feel like i'm at a cruise ship versus a small speed boat of of kind of going and starting a company and so i i think i did what a lot of entrepreneurs do which is i started trying to come up with you know ideas in the abstract and you know the i i think we went on a journey of like bad ideas until eventually it was you know came back to good and so i think at the time you know i was looking at i think similar were to or talk before this we were you know looking at places in new york and they're all kinda of bad and we're wondering why are they bad and like how we should you know cars are manufactured planes are manufactured all these products that are low cost affordable but wander that anyone can afford or manufactured wired aren't homes to manufactured so you're gonna you're you're interested in manufactured like like when i was a kid like a bunch of my boyfriend's like in my grandparents they lived in we just call the like mobile homes yeah like it's just i guess that's what they're calling in i mean the nice way manufactured houses they're were manufactured house i mean there was also you know like one of the places that like is extremely populous it's the like biggest city in the world and yet home housing isn't so crazy affordable is like tokyo are you go to japan and is because they actually most of the home builders are home manufacturers and things are very standard the cost of the new home build is like not that expensive and you know i think there's all sorts of issues in the states related to this and we thought wow we should look in into like manufacturing homes and i still buy them of i and i think that they're i've invested in a few of them they're they're very hard it was very popular right around when you were starting in ramp yeah and i invested in two or three yeah that space interested me none of them have like completely taken off in ultimately we decided not to do this for a couple of reasons so hard one actually had no business in doing it and i rented an apartment in new york i never owned home i've manufactured anything and you know there was no connecting story to it but then the more you read about it the constraint in the bottleneck was not around manufacturing at all it was all the zoning and was that you could manufacture a house that was zoned to go nowhere unless you could go and see it to there was a lot of complex problems and but i hope someone solves a lot of i i think that there's you think that's still interesting i think it's still interesting on my view is it's like the the manufacturing is part of it but the zoning question is very real it's how do you actually get any show in all these funny ways of like which weight is the house space you know how far back does it have to be set with the proportions joe debbie is doing something in this space i think if people crack this i think it is an enormous opportunity but it is like a big s and like this is one of those businesses where you're not gonna ten x for a while you're gonna be ten percent twenty percent compound but there's a great business do think to be built there because it's just too expensive so that was on the list something like tractor trailer or i don't know what you call it dude like my friends like their home or like my grandparents said lived in a place where like their home was delivered on like a truck yeah yeah and so okay so that's the interesting space yeah what else was on the list so that was on the list we there was various like random crypto things we were you know we cri and i've been interested in the stuff i going back to like twenty twelve and so we spent a little bit of time on that space you know we spent some time you know helping out different friends starting businesses we're close to z at rogue who started the the direct to consumer kind of health care business folks at candidates and so we spent some time on that kind of world and then i i think we're got interesting again is we came back to the things that we actually knew and a bit of our roots and so there was almost two variants of what eventually we became ramp variant number one is what turned to ramp and we can come back to that at at some point the other was this view of you know in the in the card space which is it feels almost voodoo from the outside it's unclear how you start these things to the business model work but we we knew this because we had spent a bunch of years inside of capital one study the the models really deeply knew the history well and and had some credibility in the space we also reached in the partnership business in the cobra brand business so let's say that you were you go to best buy and at the very end some instances would you like to open a a best buy credit card someone is doing that there's people powering those businesses who who are they it's a big one you know sync is a is is a really big name in it at capital one you know i had a large cobra brand business am max i mean all the large banks those are huge tens of billions of dollars company barclays i've sync under her tens tens of billions of dollars i've haven't looked up their their in revenue you know that is as well certainly in market cap under huge businesses and and the basic premise of that is like look is is we had out a side of our business at para where we work very closely with retailers and you know all of these these stores have strong customer loyalty and the and and credit cards are great products but they're very hard to sell and so the basic business model was if you could as added a you know if you're a store you had customer loyalty if you could convert even a tiny percentage of these customers to just take on a new credit card and that was it you would make a little bit of interchange you would kind of lower your costs when they were shopping with you but also you could make a little bit back at all the other places that customers went and shopped and so the whole question was could you build a product that was standard enough simple modi enough that you could convince lots different stores and as this was going on the online boom was happening shopify was you know opening up new retailers and stores everywhere creators were getting big you know and we thought there was a chance to have a modern card for businesses and creators and you know mba and a was a big company i mean they they figured out when you look at university credit cards that's like a huge business da murphy is here in new york his business is doing really really well imprint i've heard of that print they're doing very well these take a long time even in the cases we're like they're the fastest ever you're gonna be building these businesses for many many years and you have to ask yourself it's like do i wanna be working on this for decades i thought that it was crazy that the largest credit card companies on the planet we're working really hard to get customers spend a little bit more than they thought and then once they do they would work really hard to convince people that the points they got were worth a lot and then dev value them the background hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot helped tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show it was pretty funny you said i i read so many books on the banking industry yeah and you're like i spent weeks doing it i'm like oh i thought you would've have spent like five years like if you must have read a shit load of books and yeah in a very short amount of time did you learn about any of the weird or shady stuff that the baking industry does for consumers or like the history of credit cards and things like that like i i remember reading about i think it was bank of america was that what was that the first credit card yeah and how i believe what they did well first of all like what don't them start as like a dining club card but then another one what they did was i think they just handed out credit cards to farmers in central california something crazy like that right so the history is historically i named ap gia i think it was bank bank the america the italia it was basically bank of italy started by a very poor italian immigrant is functionally how it got started and his first big opportunity really was in like the i think it was like the earthquake of nineteen o six in san francisco were effectively you know he was working in kind of supporting and lending to like grocer immigrants farmers folks who would come into s and and trade after the earthquake there were fires everywhere a huge portion of san francisco burned down and he was one of the only people that supposedly the the story goes he set up a table out in the middle bond market street and he started making loans then and there on the spot and he went from this like tiny bank to effectively like started going everywhere and and his history is pretty interesting he he so was was kind of this bank to to merchants and then eventually to consumers in i think in the early nineteen hundreds woodrow wilson was trying to supposedly encourage lots of different banks to go and lend to small businesses in the emerging middle class right this is the things you hear about like americans are buying their first car the first washing machine all that kind of stuff and he were very big on it and so he's he was he i think was famous for setting up franchise banking where there was like little branches and branch banking in all sorts of little cities and they sort of took over what used to be like and this is relevant when you get into the history of of credit cards one of the the most common places that people would take loans would be in an department store so if you wanted to buy you know you may know that sears was the parent company to discover yeah or bank of america would actually go instead of branches in like the top you know somewhere in like a macy's so instead of macy's getting you alone so if you wanted to buy a washing machine for you know a dollar you know you would walk out of it after making a ten cent down payment and you pay them back they said we'll take over that macy's you don't need to under write each customer we as the bank can do that for you and that was the start of it what would did they do if you didn't pay no it was the loan and so it was whatever banks normally do you know maybe they could go and take the good but it just was credit bureaus exist this is before credit bureaus so what do you do if someone them pay i think that was why they had the local bankers you know they would go and work think they would try to collect for a lot of years but that was like is this like the early nineteen hundreds banking the the part where you're getting to was by the time i think bank of america was the biggest certainly the biggest bank in the us it might have been the biggest bank in the world it was just enormous enormous scale and i think the town i wanna say it was fremont yeah and so this was in the fifties and i think that it was something like sixty percent or seventy percent of everybody who lived in this town where customers of bank of america and you know if you were going to a department store they had this this branch that you could go and go to but you know if you were going to like you know any random you know hard good store you couldn't get a loan for it and so they took this bat and they said let's just get the rest of the town get everybody and we're gonna send you cards i think they mailed everybody in the town i was like a four or five digit card and you could go use this and you could say put it on my card and you would go and pay the bank back later and it just exploded suddenly you know they almost everyone in the town became customers and people were using it all the time people once they got access to credit started being able to afford more things and it was good for merchants too in know merchants who couldn't access and couldn't get a branch to come in could start to compete with the the you know large department stores that could and it it gave rise to you know the bank of america card and so the initial credit card was bank of america card once they showed a successful went to their competitor banks or regional banks and saying i will run this program for you we can issue bank of america cards for the commerce bank of seattle you know you can issue it to your your customers and we will deal with the operations paying you know collecting from the stores paying you know doing the underwriting all that kind of stuff so it was a franchise model it wasn't the model that it was today was that is credit like a uniquely american thing it you know i think there's a good argument to say yes you know in and and some of it comes back to that early nineteen hundreds kind of lineage whereas this was going on you saw the birth of the american consumer where you have department stores cars automobiles and you saw financing for the emerging middle class i would say in europe even to this day you see this very different behavior where yeah like for example they don't they put way more down when they buy a home and this exactly it i americans are very accepting a borrowing in debt you know and i think that's the that's the per way to say it i think the non polite way to say it is like you know in europe if you're rich you can borrow and if you're not paying cash that's all you can do and i think it's actually much harder for people who aren't in the middle class who are rapport you know to borrow in the us people you know it's this view of you can kinda pick pick yourself up by your own boost strings you know you can go and you know borrow for that car or for that farm equipment or that laundry machine so you can go and build your business and go into it and so i think there's a lot of good that comes with it obviously sometimes there's there's some bad people can get into credit issues but i think on net you know most businesses it take it's the startup costs are real but once you get going you can build an extraordinary business i listen to founders all the time like i was to the lizard lasagna episode and i'm really fascinated with building a company that can last for fifty a hundred two hundred years like something where god willing i hope this is true but my children wanna get involved in some capacity and it could last beyond me typically those i think those businesses that do that are not the fastest growing companies i i i actually agree is like the basic physics of what i think david and the founder podcast studies and and and what you're getting at to of of like i think if you to get down to the core of what makes great businesses it's not like who grew a hundred percent or two hundred or whatever this year it's that which businesses can grow thirty percent for thirty years and if you do that you will be a giant business but that's not what you did our our view is that we can and like the the crazy part is like we have grown extraordinarily quickly we're still just about doubling each year at enormous scale i think we are one and a half percent ish of the corporate and small business card market in the us and so if you just look at the physics of it even if we were to massively decelerate and start growing thirty percent for decades it's physically possible the market is so big you're sort of like hanging out with like the illuminati a little bit where it's like these old money families because that's what a lot of the banking industry made up of yeah because they've been around for two hundred a years they've been dealing with money forever have you noticed or found anything that you are shocked by where you're like if the consumer knew that this is how the setup is they would be infuriated it's a there's a lot there and in and what you're asking so so one these families like i think that they're focused on doing simple things well and doing it for a very very very long time and consistently and a lot of these families just like don't sell that's the biggest takeaway from the founders podcast don't sell don't fight or interrupt the power of compounding you wanna find a business where you can just compound for a long time and so i i would say when when you're just starting out or if you're building like you're terrified of like losing money or things going sideways you have real cost families friends things to take care of and so you don't interrupt the debt you you you you wanna when things get risky you sell but i think a lot of these families just stayed in for a long time when there was huge i mean classically you'd see a significant recession in the us every seven to eleven years consistently a lot of people will sell out at the bottom because they can't take any more pain or they can't take the risk of it going even further and i think the difference to a lot of these families is they would figure out how could you avoid it how could you go and stay in you know i obviously have never none of my family had anything like this inside i i also too i think it's a kid was very skeptical of people who grew up with a lot of money running my company 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development zero code is also all about ai business automation transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones so stop cobb together different tools and solutions and head to zero code dot com that's zero code as in the word zero and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that sam sent one of my favorite biographies is titan by john rec or about john rockefeller yeah and david cher who's the author he wrote one on jp jpmorgan which i'm gonna get to yeah and it's fun it's fun reading about these old banking families because they're full stories and they're typically nutty yeah you are gonna be an old baking family in that you know that's kinda like crazy to think about it's you know does that mess with you i think that a lot of the families of the past is done a great job of being like involved civic i i think that a lot of them have been more outstanding i wouldn't say all of them happen but i i do think that you know like i'm in my mid thirties i i i don't know what i thought so far ahead in on like a legacy perspective but yes ramp is a company is getting very valuable but like all my stock is in ramp it's just a certificate yeah and it's only become valuable because we've built something that makes a lot of people a lot better off my whole obsession is like how do we keep doing that for a very long time and you know maybe the money comes with it but like that's not why i do it what what was the reason why you did it so the the first company we started was definitely around like you know i i remember when our we we're down to like one month of or like a few weeks of savings and like that's it and like the worst dude it's the worst like a lot of it is well usually probably felt way the whole time yeah like that burden i i remember i felt that burden for four years ian you're just working your ass off for the worst every weekend and like it's hard to relate or i like feel it's like i remember in college i had this girlfriend who'd cheated on me and i remember it like here like but sorry to yeah yeah i remember like and then she's like go to that it was horrible and like she would go out and i'm like i had this like anxiety all the time was like like bothers me and then when i like started to business i would remember like checking the bank account all the time yeah and i'm like yeah that's same anxiety like i wanna look i don't wanna go over that i just wanna bury my head i don't wanna know i don't wanna be part of this yeah i felt that way for four years i'm curious if it changed for youtube but like after the sale like suddenly yep have security right like your your bank account looks a little more more flush you move it out of the student checking account to something more security you know you're good and then at some point you know it's i don't he adaptation you get used to it it's just like a number and account and then you have like your same anxieties you're same you have the same shit the same stuff all that kind of stuff it's better though it's better it's better it's better but you have as similar anxieties but it's not existential existential you are it is sort of existential but it's not like the baseline happiness of knowing that you're not gonna be on the street is makes like you the baseline that goes up i agree with all this half the time i listen to founders and i'm like well every time i listen to founders i think i'm gonna i'm gonna own this for fifty or a hundred years yeah and then during the day when i'm having a pain in the ass like issue come up i'm like we're gonna set this up so we could flip this thing to like it always changes right like your mood yeah your emotions are powerful and do you think you'll run this or have equity in it fifty years from now or would you sell in five or ten years if it was like a no brainer deal i was this is the last company ever work on you know i will yeah really you know i your partnership that way yes yeah you know and it's it's one of these things too we're like you know i i remember even in the early days of of going through like there is deep pain right if you're if you're growing this quickly you know what certainly got you here won't get you there and i i think that some of what cream is saying is like look if i'm gonna go through all this pain like he has this doesn't seem like you went through that much pain if i'm like looking at you guys from the outside of course it's always much challenge way more harder than it looks but like when i'm like i don't know a hundred million in revenue in in eighteen months like that like yeah like even though it's hard you're still winning and that momentum like that it's really all about dopamine meat that makes you feel good i i agree you to some of it was like not planning for downside and not something problems until they hit us in our first business so in our first business we had a a day when we lost seventy five percent of our revenue overnight vaporize there were risks that we knew about that we didn't properly manage and one of the things in ramp that we resolve to do is like cream and eye and and others are gonna just gonna beat the shit out of each other all the time worrying about problems that are three to six months to a year out in the future and so it's true if you look at kind of ramps trajectory it has been kind of nonstop growth you know fairly consistently up into the right in terms of like the the revenue the cash flow profitability all these kind of metrics has been consistently good but it's because inside of it there is so much like agony that we spend over like this metric that's gonna affect how we perform in three months from now is not going the wrong way is not going the right way what are we doing about it and so it's a lot of internally beating each other like i haven't you know when when you look at like like a i i think the analogy is like an athlete you know you you look at like it was just wimbledon in over the weekend and sin and a like each of them look like they're playing effortlessly can pull off these shots you don't imagine it's because there's been years and years and years of when you're not looking they're just ob subs practicing trying these shots so when it counts they're able to do it and so i think there's a lot of similarities there and and what i would say is like i is is you know for cream it was amplified he he had you know he's three kids now he he got started or earlier than than i did and he's like look the these are some of the most valuable you know hours all over have and if we're gonna go through this like it's gonna be because we're gonna the the ambition is gonna be real and if we have a problem we're gonna confront it right away what do you like to read i i like to read it's part of my new i like the founders podcast so much like biographies and other founders i i like reading about like you know design what you are you a designer i really like it so the the first company para i had design and product reported to me and so i i just spent a lot of years kind of like thinking about like you know the principles of it what makes products great and and so i i i love it i would probably get booted off of our design team i don't think i have quite the level of of of talent and crafting but i i definitely spend a lot of time thinking about it well in terms of favorites or what am i reading now favorite i mean my you know it's i think i probably read you know fifteen biographies of of steve jobs you know it's i i think is as great as people think he is i think he's still underrated for what he was able to do and how consistently he was able to to do it and i also think that he changed a lot over the years i think he gets tight kinda type past at this like brilliant asshole which like i think he was at the start of his career but i think he got much more interesting cared about people in a much deeper way than i think comes across and some of that is like i think people like conflicts and people like controversy but kind of forget to look at his career as he softened over the years and i think ultimately i think that's when he built apple into the the powerhouse that it is today i've been struggling to find biographies where i admire their whole life yeah if you read i mean just on steve jobs have you ever becoming steve jobs i don't remember and i've read about two or three of i i forget forgot the titles i know i did the walter isaac in one that one is good but i think that one is more kind of like pop culture steve jobs it was not but i remember read that and i'm like i don't wanna beat this person you know don't like him yeah he was very un yeah in that book but what what was becoming steve jobs it so the central question of it was exam examining like who he was over the course of his life and so effectively as were journalist people who covered him for like forty years and knew him from when he was like the twenty year old kinda wonder to you know kind of like end of his life it came out around the time i think a few months after the isaac and i think that they felt similarly that so much of we was portrayed out was was like this brilliant jerk and said we're trying to focus of like how did he change over the course of his life and i think it's an amazing amazing read because i think it focuses much more on like him or or the lessons or the things that shaped and changed the style and i i would say like i super i really highly recommend that book there's other great great ones too on other aspects like i love insanely simple i love insanely great steve levi that's like a a lesser read but wonderful book just about just like fifteen of them yeah wow yeah so chat gb has become my life coach yeah and there's like a prompt where it's like i forget exactly what it but it's like everything you know about the boil it down to one word okay and i think i phrase it where i'm like tell me like my issue or my flaw so it's like it's gonna be negative and it i think i said two words and the first one was jealousy and the second one was fear yeah which are very similar emotions actually i think but it was like rooted in like comparing yourself to other people yeah in new york city it's like so easy to do that yeah and it's like dialed up to attend you're strange to me because you seem like such a you are so successful at a such young age and also you seem emotionally stable those typically aren't hard save that safest this you what i mean the little little out there yeah you wanna be yeah it's it's and and i find that unique and interesting about you look i i i will like compete very aggressively in in things that i believe it believe and don't him to be wrong but like you look back and you're having like a shit day and you're like alright i had bad morning what does this affect my afternoon at all you know i've got a half a day left do i wanna make a count or not and i just think the ability to just like stop catch yourself and reset is really important and is increasingly hard as he kinda get older but it's super important and i some of it was like early experiences like you know my older brother grown up would have like these really strong mood swings and all kinds of things would go on and he had different kind of like you know learning difficulties and stuff and and he would take medicine and it would like radically change his mood and i was like i i remember as a kid like that was so jarring and and weird someone could be like you know feel a certain way and then suddenly you know feel differently with strange to see and then you know i i think as a kid i i don't like i'd fully processed the thought but i remember you know i i'd get really mad too are be going to sleep and i was angry about something and i was like oh my why am i mad if i could not be mad just being mad help me or not that's a that's an interesting very very intros philosophical question to ask like well why do feel this fight and do i have to yeah yeah you know and i you know i i think you know my brother and i get all sorts of fight suit and i remember when like feel like a fork and went into my leg and stuff like that and you know you we have three boys in in a house like they're they're probably not as fun as as as little girls they they do more interesting things and i think my our parents would my mom was really good like alright like i'm gonna sit both me down and you're gonna have to go and explain like you're gonna listen to your brother as he says why he was mad and and you get like pissed and and you'd wanna go whatever and you'd be like you know you have to go say and you to say it back to him and then you're gonna say your side and then he's gonna say it back to you it's a super intentional thing to do i think it was really in my parents never would they would been like you guys just shut up yeah it drove me off the goddamn wall but after long enough is your mom like a was she like a hippie like that's strange like that no that's stuff with it like that stuff's popular now with that yeah would that's probably how that's i'm gonna parent my kid yeah but that's like some gentle parenting like hippie dip shit which i buy into i mean it was which what was her job teacher therapist or something no i she sold like telecom like that's interesting telecom play to parent good parenting i guess but it teaches you to consider the other side a little bit into to calm down you see the complexity of things and then you know later on when you seize something chemically change other people it's hard to do it but you know it forced you to start wondering like is it me or is it the you know something going on in my head that's making me feel this way and and look like i i think sometimes stress is good other times it's not and i i think you know ramp is a big company there's a lot of pressures in and stuff that are natural and you know like if you step back and you're like alright how i act and how i you know how you feel can really impact how you think about things you know i i think i now it's it's much more trained but you spend a lot of time to speak tape what is the heads space i i don't regularly how are you this small balance you read different books too i mean it's now a little more more tri but like it's was funny i like ryan holiday stuff when you wrote kinda trust me lying but then you got vi the s s kind of philosophy to read like meditations and stuff like that and so i think you picked some of that up i tried to debit a day where i just like hang out just i don't know going to run do different things you to clear my head yeah okay usually saturday yeah usually usually then and then sunday i'll pick stuff back up but i also think too during your week like i think especially with other founders as life goes on you were probably really good at something and you did it a lot and that's what allowed you to build this company then suddenly you're running the company and you don't have time to do the thing that you really liked anymore yeah and i think that a lot of people lose control over their own week and they don't actually audit like am i spending the time on things and i'm good at or not to be or or wanna be spending the time on in so and i it pretty regularly try to go and like blow up my calendar and be like alright i actually love doing this thing am i spending any time on it no and because i promise if you you just spend your too many weeks in a row doing something you hate you're gonna be miserable you're gonna be stressed out inside redesign my weeks or month pretty regularly i that helps a question i've been asking myself a lot is like where's my weakness now yeah and like what do i need to really work on yeah it's actually whenever i do reference checks with people one of my little tricks is i'll be like what's this person one out of ten and they're always gonna say like eight or nine yeah everyone says that and i'm like cool what makes them and at nine or whatever okay now to get that extra point what if they need to work on i like this question that's where you hear like weaknesses that's the only polite way i've been able to get someone to like talk shit on someone yeah it's important i you're like yeah and then like a lot of those weaknesses that they have i'm like i could put up at that yeah whatever like if someone's like well they're really not patient like hope okay that sounds gonna be whatever what flaws or weaknesses do you have now that you think you have to overcome to get to where you wanna be in a decade or two so all all slightly critique the the question which is like if you're like a one person company this is exactly the right question of like how can i change in order to get better but if you're like a ten person or a thousand person company or whatever you are in it you're on a team you can change or you can change how the team is constructed is i think the more interesting way to think about it and what what i'll tell you like one of my big flaws which is probably very surprising for you know ramp scale is like i don't know if there's like a hundred things to do that are very important to get done the way my mind works is like i'll start with a blank sheet of paper i'll be like what are the top five for ten things and like write them down and then i'll like forget forget about the rest and don't do them and like that's fine early on when things there's like one or two things that matter but like will blow up the company if you're just consistently not dealing with ninety percent of issues and one of the things that i do in order to cope with that and compensate for that is i surround myself with people who are operationally unbelievable we're incredibly good at tri and cascading getting things done and making things move and what i would say is like it's actually totally fine to have huge flaws and you could decide to fix them or you can say i'm actually gonna design you know my life or the company or whatever to be performing in that context and so i think that's okay and and and i i i guess what i what i would say is like a lot of the way that we've built ramp and you know i think about building companies is a lot of folks kind of look for you know what are things they're good at what are the things they're bad at and how do i you know identify all the problems and it's good to know about that i agree what i'm referring to do is like like for example yeah i'm a very emotional person yeah and like i like a trick that i've been learning is like it don't make it's like don't go to go to store and you're hungry yeah don't make a big decision when i'm feeling pissed off about something or you know or really happy about something like don't make decisions there so you i got i have to wait or when someone tells me something i don't like don't react yeah just say okay let me think about it and so my big thing is just like it's it's all about emotional regulation in in impulse control that's like that's what i have to that's my big flaw and i think i you i have to improve that to be a better person yeah now and i'm not even referring to just business yeah but that will impact it positively as well yeah i totally agree you thanks dude that's a pod thanks a lot i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel ever looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the number one audio destination for business professionals billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn boundaries and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure fear your courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode