セ
今日の事業の考え方と、この先数ヶ月の見通しを、そのまま頭の中からダウンロードしてほしい。
EN
I want to basically a download of your thoughts on how you're thinking about your business today and moving forward in the let's say the next few months.
グ
君も Ramp を使っているし知っていると思うけど、いまのスナップショットを渡すね。Ramp は、事業を回すためのより賢い財務インフラだと考えてほしい。一つの場所から、カード、請求書支払い、調達などあらゆる支払いができる。資金の管理もできる。経費も、会計も自動化できる。
これらのツールは全部、ビジネスをもっとうまく回し、1ドルと1時間からより多くの価値を引き出すための単一の平面として作っている。自分たちの測り方はシンプルで、「Ramp を入れたあと、顧客は何ドル少なく使えるようになったか」「事業運営に何時間少なく使えるようになったか」だ。
今日、7万社以上が Ramp を使っている。米国のコーポレートカード取引の3%超が Ramp 経由で、コーポレート取引全体の約1%が Ramp を通っている。いちばん実用的な数字は、典型的な採用企業は年間で経費を5%超カットできる、ということ。知っての通り、節約した1ドルは稼いだ1ドルより価値がある。そして採用企業の売上成長の中央値は年16%——米国平均は3〜4%だ。ドルと時間を、もっと遠くへ伸ばしたいだけだ。
EN
You use Ramp and you you know it, but um I'm going to give you a snapshot of where we are. Um you can think of Ramp as smarter financial infrastructure to run your business, right? From one single place, you can make payments of all kinds, whether that's cards, bill payments, procurement. You can better manage funds. Uh you can automate expenses and even automate your accounting, right? And the way all of these tools are built is meant to be a single plane for you to better run uh your business and get more value out of every dollar and hour. The way that we measure ourselves um is how many fewer dollars do our customers spend after adopting Ramp and how many fewer hours uh are they using to go and run their business? Today, over 70,000 businesses uh use Ramp. Over 3% of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States uh are powered by Ramp and nearly 1% of all the corporate transactions uh are running through Ramp. And I think the most uh useful piece of information is that like, you know, the typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over 5% per year. And as you know, like a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned. The typical business that adopts Ramp uh is growing their revenue uh a median of 16% per year. Um the US average is 3 to 4%. And so, we're just trying to make dollars and hours go further.
セ
オフカメラでもよく AI の話をするよね。Ramp はコーポレートカードから始まった。いま X で語られ方を見ると、「AI で財務チームをもっと効率的に、もっと幸せにする」がいいコピーになってる。AI の使い方と、作っているプロダクトを話して。
EN
You and I and our when we're talking off camera uh talk a lot about AI. The you know, Ramp started as corporate credit cards. Now you look at how people speak about you guys on X. It's like they're just using AI to make your finance team more efficient and happier is like a great line that you have. Talk about like some of the ways that you guys are using AI and like what are the products you're building?
グ
いちばん身近な体験は、たとえば経費精算そのものだ。そこから請求書払い、帳簿締めまで話す。多くの人にとって、経費精算は月でいちばん最悪な1時間だ。
考えてみると、みんな「正常」として受け入れているのがおかしい。どこかの会社が社員にカードを発行する。でも経費ポリシーがそのカードの動きを実際には駆動していない。クライアントとの食事を払って紙のレシートをもらい、まったく別会社の別システムにログインして、社員本人が手で経費を入力する。時間の無駄だ。その日やってもいいのに、たぶん1ヶ月後にやって、また1時間を溶かす。
別の街や州の誰かがそれをレビューする——全部が面倒な儀式だ。Ramp では全部を融合する。スマートカードを発行する。経費ポリシーがカードの振る舞いを駆動する。タップしたらリアルタイムでポリシー内外をチェックする。OKなら加盟店からデータを取り、取引を処理し、メモを書き、会計ソフトに押し込み、終わり。ゼロタッチ経費だ。
請求書払いも同じ。中小企業でベンダーから請求書が来ると、AP担当や自分で50クリックと大量の時間が飛ぶ。このベンダーは誰か、なぜ金を借りているか、約束したサービスは納品されたか、明細を手入力——終わるまで50クリック、という世界。Ramp ではアップロードするだけで、契約があるか、サービスが履行されたかなどをチェックし、フィールドは自動入力。一度直すと、次の似た請求書は正しく処理される。結果として、請求は期日どおりに払われる。
もっと安い払い方があるならキャッシュバックを取る、早期払いの条件が良ければ自動で早期払い、ということもできる。テスラが A から B に連れていくだけでなく、運転の集中を奪わずに運ぶように設計されているように、Ramp は財務プロセスに対して同じことをしようとしている。CFO にとっては、組織の中を動く資金が一箇所で追跡・会計され、次にどこで1ドルと1時間の効用を上げられるかを提案される、という感覚だ。
EN
One of the most I'd say like present experiences just like the act of let's say doing an expense report. So, we'll we'll go there. We'll talk about paying bills. We'll talk about closing your books, right? Um for many people, doing your expenses like just the worst hour of your month, right? And if you think about it, it's sort of nuts that everyone accepts as normal that some company somewhere is going to issue you or your employee a card. Or your expense policy is not going to drive that the thing actually works. You're going to pay for a client dinner, you're going to get a piece of paper, then you're going to go into another system maintained by an entirely different company, and you the employee are going to go manually do your expenses yourself. Kind of a waste of time. You could do it that day, you probably do it a month later, and it's an hour of your time wasted. Someone in another city or state reviews this thing, it's a whole rigmarole. At Ramp, we fuse all of it, right? And so we issue smart cards. Your expense policy drives how the thing actually behaves. You tap it, we check in real time is it in or out of policy. If it is, we pull the data from the merchant, we process the transaction, we write the memo, we push it into your accounting software, and it's done. Zero-touch expenses. Similar for paying bills. Often if you're a small business, and let's say you receive an invoice from a vendor, it's 50 clicks and a lot of your time wasted for you or an AP clerk. You're checking who is this vendor, why do we owe them money, did they deliver the service that they promised they would? You're entering the itemized level details, and it could be 50 clicks before the time you're done. With Ramp, you upload it, we check all those things, right? Do you have a contract? Was a service ultimately rendered? All the fields are entered for you, and if you go and change it, the next time you get a similar invoice, it's done correctly. And so the effect is actually like your bills are paid on time. If there's a lower cost way to do it, maybe you can earn cash back on it, or maybe you get better terms by paying early. We can do that automatically for you. And so the effect is is something more like if there's car companies interested, like a maybe a Tesla is is designed to not just get you from A to B, but to drive you there without you needing to like, you know, spend your focus on it. Ramp is trying to do this for your financial processes, and the effect is if you're a CFO, it gives you one place where all of the funds that are moving inside of your organization are being tracked, or being accounted for, and ultimately [snorts] we're recommending the next time where you can get more utility to every dollar that's flowing through your org or hour is like how you can think about
セ
社内ではミッションをどう説明する？ スティーブ・ジョブズは20代でも50代でも同じフレーズ——「insanely great products」——を繰り返した。Shopify のトビ・ルトケに話を聞いたときも、社内に染み渡っているのは「起業家のためのインフラを作る」だった。CEO として Ramp のチームには何と言う？
EN
you describe the mission inside the company though? So like something that's very common obviously one of my favorite examples of this is like Steve Jobs, you know, would describe what he wanted to do. He said he used the same phrase when he was in his 20s, he used the same phrase when he was in his 50s, he says insanely great products. He would just repeat, you want to make insanely great products? Come with me. If you don't, then you shouldn't be working here. I just talked to Tobi Lutke from Shopify. The way I would think about the mission of his company and the way it's spread throughout internally it's like we're building infrastructure for entrepreneurs. So how do you describe it as a CEO to your team inside of Ramp? I think our mission is endless, right? It is to help every business owner get more out of every dollar and hour. That's what we're trying to do. The credit cards that we offer, the expense management, the bill payments, the accounting automation, these are just products. At the end of the day what we were trying to do is really measure for all the dollars that have passed through your organization, how do we make sure that few will leave your your organization at the end of the month? That you get more for every dollar and every hour is what we are trying to do. And I think what made Ramp start to scale very early on in a very crowded industry that people thought we weren't we were like 175 years late to was this was I think really inverting a lot of the way that many of our competitors had acted. Right? If you kind of look at the credit card industry, which is where we started, even just 7 years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through these points and rewards programs. Go spend more money, you can earn points and multipliers will have your back. And it was I think exactly the opposite of what most business owners and CFOs that I knew wanted. They actually wanted more in their bank account, and they wanted their employees spending less time on this stuff. And so simply by inverting that primary assumption and saying, what if instead of going and trying to get you to be a little bit worse off by spending more than you intended, what if I worked really hard to help you spend less? It leads you to answer different kinds of questions. It's part of why we're the first in the industry to go look at expenses and say like, why are why are there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do? It's part of why we said like, why do you need another different tool for bill payments? Why do you need another one for procurement? Why do you need another one for for for treasury? And ultimately where where it's led us is to build better infrastructure and kind of the substrate where your your dollars are moving through it. But again, I I care less about what are the dollars we're moving, but actually how do we get more value from every movement that's occurring.
グ
ミッションは終わりがない。あらゆる事業主が、すべての1ドルと1時間からより多くを得られるようにする——それがやろうとしていることだ。クレジット・カード、経費管理、請求書払い、会計自動化は、ただのプロダクトだ。結局測りたいのは、組織を通ったすべてのドルについて、月末にどれだけ少なく外へ出させるか、ということ。1ドルごと、1時間ごとに、より多くを返すことだ。
混雑した業界で——みんな「175年遅れてきた」と思っていた業界で——Ramp が早くスケールし始めた理由は、競合の行動を反転したことにあると思う。7年前のカード業界では、みんな合意していた。「事業を取る最良の方法はポイントとリワードだ。もっと使え、倍率で後押しする」と。でも僕が知っている事業主や CFO が本当に欲しかったのは、その真逆だった。銀行口座にもっと残したいし、社員の時間もこの雑務に使わせたくない。
だから主前提を反転させた。「意図より多く使わせて少し損をさせる」のではなく、「より少なく使う手伝いを本気でする」なら？ 違う問いに答えるようになる。なぜ買うたびに2つのシステムが絡むのか。請求書払いに別ツール、調達に別ツール、トレジャリーにまた別ツールが要るのか。結果として、ドルが通る基盤・基板を良くする方向に行った。でも、動かすドルの量そのものより、動きの一つひとつからどれだけ価値を取れるかのほうが大事だ。
EN
So can I think of the North Star that you're working backwards from? Right, when you guys are talking about I'm going to build we're going to build new products new features. The question you ask yourself first is like, is this saving our customers either time or money?
セ
じゃあ北極星は、新プロダクトや機能を作るとき、最初に「これは顧客の時間かお金を節約するか？」を聞く、と考えていい？
EN
That's right.
グ
そのとおり。
EN
Correct. Okay, so
セ
OK。北極星はそこから逆算している。
EN
That's the North Star you're working backwards from.
グ
まさにそれだ。あと、僕は長いこと Founders と君が作っているもののファンで、イーロンのアルゴリズムは、僕らにとってすごく動機づけになり、方向づけになり、明晰にしてくれる。企業内のお金の移動、リソース配分、その計測のすべてのプロセスに、似た哲学を当てようとしている。そもそも誰の要件か。何を達成したいのか。すべてのステップが要るか。簡略化できないか。不要部分を切れないか。開発を加速できないか。簡略化したあと、もっと自動化できないか。
その方法論と考え方を、組織が使う1ドルと1時間すべてに当てはめ、より少ない労力で、より利益の出る事業運営を可能にする技術を作る。それが本当にやろうとしていることだ。プロダクトは、そのサービスを届けるための足場とフォームファクタにすぎない。
EN
Yeah. That is exactly right. And and I I I think a lot of it too like I've
セ
AI は加速している。君たちは使える新技術を全部取り入れようとしている。深夜の食事でもそればかりだ。でも質問は、Ramp に会った人がすごく多いんだけど、君たちはスパイク（尖り）で採用する。元ファウンダーが Ramp に入る人も、Ramp から出て会社を作る人も多い。起業家の血が会社に流れている。
AI エージェントが仕事を補い、場合によっては置き換える今、採用の考え方は2年前とどう違う？
EN
[snorts]
グ
AI で変わっていることはいくつかある。一つは、べき乗則がさらに極端になっていること。会社は大きくなり、立ち上がる速度も加速している。タレントへのリターンはこれまで以上に高い。世界でいちばん効く人は、もう10倍でも100倍でもなく、ある領域では1000倍効くことがある。だから尖った人を見つける、というのは完全に正しい。
この1年でいちばん頭が曲がったのは、LLM を本当に内面化すると、スキルは希少で見つけにくい世界から、意志の強いゼネラリストが、昔よりずっと多くをできるようになる世界に入りつつある、ということだ。
LLM は、生きているどのエンジニアより多くのコードを読んだ。生きているどの医者より多くの症例を読んだ。どの会計士より多くの決算資料と勘定科目表を読んだ——おそらくこれから先も含めて。ある意味、いい問いさえ出せば、僕は人生でいちばん良い「医者」になれる。医者でもないのに。頑固に続ければ、境界を押し広げられる。
この100年くらいの仕事は、あるクラフトや専門にすごく強くなることだった。でも境界に当たると——すごいエンジニアでもデザインに入ると「デザイナーに聞け」、営業は「営業の達人に聞け」——そこまでだった。いまは頑固で、システムを作り始めれば、境界を伸ばせる。
ポジティブに読めば、得意領域にロックされず、もっと多くをやれる。事業を作る側にとってより面白い読みは、高い意志とドライブを持つ人を見つければ、その人は昔より遥かに多くをできる、ということ。特定の尖りだけに限らない。すると、細かい専門に分かれた組織設計——壁と障壁と、組織のあいだで失われるもの——を疑い、根本から簡略化できる。
EN
been a I mean a huge fan of founders and what you've been building for years. Like I I think of Elon's algorithm as one that has been incredibly motivating and orienting and clarifying for us. Right, with [snorts] every process of money movement or allocation of resources or measurement of of of money movement that occurs inside of companies, we are trying to apply a similar philosophy of asking, you know, whose requirement is this in the first place? What is that we're trying to achieve? Do we need every single step? Is there a way to simplify the process? Can we cut out unnecessary parts? Can we accelerate the this the amount of time it takes to develop a feature? And then once we've simplified it, can we go and automate more parts of the process at the end? And what we were trying to do is take that methodology and that style of thinking and ask about every dollar or hour that organizations choose to spend and how can we build technologies that make it such that like you can just run your business more profitably with less effort. That's really what we're trying to do and the products we make are frankly just scaffolding in a form factor for us to go deliver that service to our customers. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5% and one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their [music] business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should, too. Go to ramp.com to learn how it can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places [music] and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers [music] inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch on AppLovin [music] in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So, you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.
セ
待って。「組織のあいだの障壁」って何？
EN
So, AI is accelerating. You guys are adopting every single new technology possible you can. You guys are obsessed with this. A lot of late-night dinners we have is about this. My question though is like, I've met so many people at Ramp, like you guys hire for spikes, and you see this because so many people we either former founders that now work in Ramp or used to work at Ramp and then start companies. Right? So, you have that like very like entrepreneurial like lifeblood that's running throughout the company. Curious, do you think about talent differently now because so much of your work can be or is supplemented, in some cases replaced, by like AI agents. Like, how are you thinking about hiring now given the capabilities of AI compared to, say, 2 years ago?
グ
こう言う。Ramp が10人のとき、「どこで働いてる？」と聞かれたら「Ramp でエンジニアやってる」だった。50人くらいだと「Ramp のセールス」くらいになる。200人、500人になるとアイデンティティの反転が起きる。「Ramp の営業マン」「Ramp のデザイナー」——クラフトで自分を定義し、同じクラフトの人とばかり話す。大企業はバベルの塔みたいになる。営業は実在のエンジニアを知らない。エンジニアは実在のデザイナーを知らない。情報は上に上がって下に降り、組織はビザンチン化する。
いまは、プロダクトを作る人が、よりうまく売るための技術、顧客追跡、アウトリーチ、最初から良いピッチを書くツールを使える。今日すでに作れる。組織内の専門の種類が減り、この世界に合う組織の形かを問い直す会社が増えている。この分野、いま本当に面白い。
EN
There's [snorts] a few things that I think are evolving with with AI. One, uh just the the power laws are getting more extreme in the same way. Um uh companies are getting larger. The speed to which companies are are getting built is is accelerating. I think the returns to talent is higher than ever. The most effective person in the world is no longer uh 10 times as effective or 100 times as effective. It could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area. So, I think finding people uh who are very spiky in areas I think is absolutely right. The thing which is I think has bent my mind most over the past year is if you're really internalizing what LLMs are are doing, I think we used to be in a world where skills were very scarce and very hard to find. And I think we're starting to get to a place where a very determined generalist can start to do much more than it used to be able to do, right? To to explain a bit more of what what I mean,
セ
組織の形の話は後で。いまの理解だと、この時代は「やろうとしていることに対して、可能な限り最高のエージェンシーの人を見つける」だよね。じゃあ質問。採用で、高エージェンシーな人をどう見つける？ トビのクリップが流れていて——彼は高校中退で、「学歴を聞くのは完全に皮肉だ」と言う。Shopify ではインタビューで人生の話をさせる。高エージェンシーな人は、「この壁にぶつかって、こう乗り越えた」が人生の話の中に自然に出る、と。君たちはどうやる？
EN
[snorts]
グ
だいたい二つ見ている。一つはトビに完全同意で、スパイクや並外れたドライブの証拠を探す。ある分野で上位1%や0.1%になれる人はいるが、多くはない。もしそうなら、過去のどこかに痕跡があるはずだ。
例を挙げると、Ramp にはエンジニアの一群——いまやコミュニティ——がいて、15歳のころ Minecraft を週80〜100時間やっていた、という理由で見つけた。プライベートサーバーを作って、他の子が熱中するほど面白くして、そのうち一人は文字どおり「小さい」うちに小さな事業者になり、大学を何十万ドル単位で自力で払った。他の Minecraft 開発者も全部知っていた。
伝統的な採用だと「学位がない」「バランスが悪い」で落とす。でもすごい集中とドライブがある。当時のコミュニティに聞くと「執拗で、細部にうるさく、API を曲げて誰も知らなかったことができる」と言われる。尖りはゲームでもスポーツでも成績でもいい。資格がなくてもすごい仕事を世に出している人もいる。君だって、10年前に座って「すごいポッドキャストを作りたい」と言って、何年もやり続けた。Founders の話をいろんな人から聞いた。
要するに、履歴書より proof of work（仕事の証拠）に興味がある。賞でも、作ったものでも、「これは電撃的だ」と思える作品でもいい。GitHub で活発な人を探し、奇妙なフリンジ・コミュニティのリーダーに会いにも行く。面接が10ラウンド・15時間あっても、一緒に働いた2営業日の情報量のほうが多い。だからリファラルをすごく使う。表の自分と実際の自分の非対称情報を持つ人を探す。
二つ目に時間をかけるのは、動機だ。世の中にはすごい仕事がたくさんある。Ramp で働きたいと決めつけるのは傲慢だ。人類を多惑星にする仕事も、AGI もいい。なぜ僕らの仕事に興味を持つべきだと思う？ そこは、相手が本当に何を欲しているかから始まる。
誰もが自分の旅の主人公だ。Ramp が5年後・10年後・15年後どうなるかとは独立に、その人はどこにいたいのか。何がドライブなのか。それが Ramp のミッションと重なるか、重なりを見せられるか。「人生の何年かをこのミッションに使ってほしい、価値がある理由はこれだ」と説得できるか。同じものを欲しがる証拠がなければ、時間を無駄にするな。この二つを、面接でたくさん見ている。
EN
large language models have read more lines of code than any engineer alive, right? They've read more medical case text than any doctor alive. They've read more company filings and chart of accounts than any accountant who's ever lived or probably ever will live. And in some sense, if I can just ask a good question, I'm the best doctor I've ever been in my life and I'm not like a doctor at all, right? If I'm just stubborn, I can keep going and do this. And in a way, like I think a lot of work over the past 100 years was you would have some craft or subject matter expertise that you were very very good at. But once you hit kind of the boundary, right? You were a great engineer, but you enter into design, you say, you can have your intuition, but ask the designer, right? Or you can have your ideas, but go ask someone who's skilled at sales. At sales. And now, if you were stubborn enough and pushing and willing to start to go build systems, you can extend your boundaries. So the the positive interpretation is you're not geeked up and you can do a lot more. But I think the more interesting interpretation for people building businesses is is is first, if you find really determined people with a high level of determination and an aptitude just like a drive, these people can do far more than they ever used to be able to do. So it's not restricted just to specific spikes. And then I think it leads you to question you design organizations with lots of sub specialties, which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations. And I think you can radically simplify.
セ
それで思い出した。Spotify 共同 CEO のグスタフと話した。彼はスタートアップを売却し、Spotify に入り、18年働いて共同 CEO になった。トップのリーダーシップの在籍平均はだいたい10年、と言っていた。一方イーロンは「新しい血が欲しい、人を回したい」と言う。一貫性を取りたい？ コアを長く一緒に置きたい？ どう考える？
EN
Wait, what what does that mean? The barriers between organizations?
グ
経験の水準は変わり、特有の学びはある。でも一般的な適性はかなり一貫していると思う。
たとえばスタッフ・ルートを取り、MIT でいちばん頭のいい人を探すなら、聞き回せば1セメスター以内で上位50人はだいたいわかる。多くの会社はジュニア年やジュニア夏までインターンを採らない。でも「いちばん頭のいい1年生」を冬や夏のインターンで取りに行ける。適性のすごい人を早めに取り、他の1年生も「いちばん頭のいい子が行った」と見れば、良い循環ができる。
イーロンの「本当に頭のいい人を探す」には同意する。ジュニア夏や社会人5年後にはもう価格が織り込み済みで、クオンツや AI ラボと真正面で戦う。キャリア初期はレジュメがないから、適性・ドライブ・パフォーマンスの可能性のサインを早く見つけ、親和性を作れる。
そういう人に、年齢の割に大きな責任を渡し、長い時間とすごい仕事をさせ、経験を会社の中で早く積ませる。すると残りたい、作り続けたい、となる。実際の目標は、できるだけ早く人と働き始め、できるだけ長く一緒に働くことだ。信頼が積み上がり、お互いの文を完成させられるようになり、頼り合い、速く動き、短い時間でより多く伝えられ、速度が上がる。
EN
I'll put it this way. When Ramp was, call it 10 people, and you ask people, you know, where do you work? Or or you do here? They'd say, I work at Ramp and I'm an engineer. Uh you get to 50, you might hear something simpler and you know, I work at Ramp and I'm in the sales team. And you start seeing these different divisions as grow. But once you start getting to like 200 or 500 people, you start hearing this inversion and identity. People say, you know, I'm a sales person at Ramp. I'm a designer at Ramp. They start to identify by their craft and what they do and what they were asked to do. They interact with mostly people who are in their craft. Uh sales people talk with other sales people and you you see these mega corporations. It's kind of like the Tower of Babel where, you know, this No one in sales knows an actual engineer. The engineers don't know any actual designers. Everything's hard cuz information has to go up top and down on through. Uh and these organizations become very Byzantine. Uh and I think now in a world where, you know, someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track customers, um that helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go. Uh and these are real tools that you can build for people today. I think you start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations and it's leading uh I think a lot of organizations right now to question, uh do I have the right or shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into? It's I I just find this whole field really interesting right now.
セ
ほぼ ESP みたいなものが育つ、と。収録前にも話したけど、数日前に MrBeast の回を録った（諸事情で数ヶ月出ないかもしれない）。彼と時間を過ごすと面白い。長く一緒に働いた人——一緒に住み、起きている時間のほとんどを共にした人——がいて、100時間どころか1万時間を優に超えている。
オペレーションのタイラー（名前が合っていれば）は、セットに入ると、MrBeast が口を開く前に「もう分かっている。あのライトはこう、カメラはここに置いた理由はこう」と言う。Beast は「それが俺がやるはずだったことだ」と言う。そしていい台詞があった。「100時間ではそこまで行かない。」
チャーリー・マンガーの家にも、亡くなる直前に行った。他の起業家が「いまバフェットとどのくらい話す？」と聞くと、「話しすぎて、もう電話しなくてもよくなった」と。お互いの考えを整理し合ってきたので、頭の中で会話できる、という意味だった。
EN
I want to go to the shape of organization if you think you need to change it or not. You So, what I'm understanding from what you're saying is like essentially, you're looking right now in this age, you should just find the highest agency person possible for what you're trying to do inside your company. I have a question for you. How do you find high agency people right now when you guys are hiring? I just saw a clip from this podcast which actually we like. It was Toby talking about this. And he's like, listen, I'm a high school dropout. The idea that I'm going to like ask for your credentials would be like completely ironic. And the way Shopify does it is when they're interviewing, he's like, I want you to tell me your life story. And in your life story, you're going if you're a high agency person, you're going to have examples of this thing I ran into this blockade and this is what I did to get over it. And so they have high agency people reveal themselves through the telling of their life story. How do you do it?
グ
そう。ミッションのより純粋な追求ができる。お互いが何を追い、成功の意味が何か、自分が何に優れ、相手に何を頼めるかがわかる。強い文化と強い信頼がある会社では、タレント水準が違うというより、1時間あたりのスループットが根本的に高い。僕らは両方の形を追っている。
最後に——組織にいちばんダメージを与えるのは、似た報酬・似た持ち分で、ただ体重を預けていない人がいることだ。「死ぬほど働いて、いろいろ諦めているのに、ただ乗りしている人がいて、高い基準を強制していない。なぜ最高を目指して執念を燃やす必要がある？ この組織は、基準を上げ続けることへの敬意を示していない」——公平な問いだ。
勝ちたい。でも自分と Ramp の多くの人を動かすのは、毎朝起きて少しでも良くなり、少しでもインパクトを出し、やっていることを上手くなる、という信念だ。その信念を共有する組織は、iron sharpens iron（鉄は鉄を研ぐ）で、より良いプロダクトをより速く作る。僕は Ramp でいちばん頭がいいとは思っていない。近いですらない、悲しいことに。
僕の仕事は、人が人生の仕事をするための条件を作ることだ。すごい人を見つけ、Ramp をその仕事をしたくなる場所にし、入ったらすごい仕事ができ、速く決め、正しさ・誤りを速く見て、プロダクトを人の手に届けて動く。他の人のブロックを外すのが仕事だ。
EN
There are two things that I'm generally looking for, right? One, I completely agree with Toby. I think you're trying to look for some evidence of a spike or some level of exceptional drive. I think that there are many people in certain fields that can be top 1% or 0.1% in some field, but most of most are not. And I think that if folks are, there's usually some evidence to some degree somewhere in the past that you can find. When I think about a a couple of these things, uh you know, I think about there's an engineer uh and actually a whole litany now, a whole community of people at Ramp who uh we found them because you know, when they were 15 years old, they were paying playing like 80 hours, 100 hours a week just on Minecraft. And a few of them were known for building these private Minecraft uh servers that were so entertaining other kids would love you know, one of them paid his way through college, hundreds of thousands of dollars by making something that was entertaining like he became like a small business person uh when he was quite literally very small. Uh you know, and it turns out he knew all the other um you know, Minecraft developers. And you find these people he would have missed. Like I think that a lot of traditional ways of looking for employees would go and say, "Oh, they don't have a college degree. They aren't well-rounded in all these ways." But he has this incredible focus and drive. And if you talk to the other folks who are in the community at the time, people say like he was incredibly obsessive. He was super detailed and he was able to to bend the API to do things that we didn't know it could do because he was so discerning. And I I think you can often find um people with incredible spikes. Um sometimes it's through video games, sometimes it's through sports, who has the drive to go and be that good. It can be through grades. Um it can be by uh people who didn't have any of these credentials somehow are out there making and putting out incredible work. Like I think even you know, just about you, I think you just sat down one day a decade ago and you said like I want to make incredible podcast. And for [snorts] years and years and years you were working on this and I I just remember meeting a lot of folks who just kept talking about like there's this guy making Founders podcast and it's really good. You look to the it's all to say I'm less interested in what is the resume. I'm far more interested in like proof of work. It can be an award, it can be something you built, it can be like a great work that you read and say this is electric. And so often I think I'm really looking for signs of that and you can find that I think by by searching of like where is work, where are people producing interesting, you know, achievements, awards, bodies of work and actually starting and looking for that. And so part of our hiring process is actually going and just trying to look for people who are very active on on GitHub. We're trying to meet people who like were leaders in like different bizarre fringe communities. And it turns out too like even if you have a really intensive interview process and you you you have like 10 rounds of interviews, right? And you interview someone for 15 hours, it turns out in two business days of working with someone, you're going to have more information about working with that person. So we rely a lot on referrals. We try to find people where who have maybe some asymmetric information about who someone actually is versus who they present to be. I think the next thing which I specifically spend a lot of time looking for is you know, look, there's a lot of incredible things to work on in the world, right? I shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that people need to want to work for for Ramp or whatever it is that we're working on. Or you can be working on making humanity multi-planetary. You can be working on artificial general intelligence. Why should I assume people should be interested in what we're doing? And I think a lot of that starts with asking what is their actual motivation. I think in some sense like you and I like we only live our lives, right? Everyone in some sense is the hero of their own journey, of their own story, and try to spend a lot of time, you know, forget even some of the capabilities, but like what does someone want independence of what Ramp will do in 5, 10, 15 years? Where do they hope to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What drives them? What motivates them? Does that coincide and can I see and understand how it could coincide or present how, you know, me saying, "Actually, please spend years of your life working on this mission and I'll try to convince you why it's worthwhile." If there isn't a clear sign of evidence of why they might want the same thing and how it can connect, like don't worry about it. Don't waste your time. And so, those are the two things that I spend a lot of time looking for when I'm interviewing people.
セ
Ramp はいま何年？ 6年？ 7年？ 日数で数えているのは知ってるけど、年だと？
EN
That brings something I thought to my mind. I just had a conversation with Gustav, who's the co-CEO of Spotify, and one thing that's remarkable about him is like he start he had a startup, sold a startup, then goes to work for Spotify, then works there for 18 years, then becomes the co-CEO. And if you look at the top leadership in Spotify, it's usually I think he said something like a decade is the average that they've been working together. And on the other end, you have people like Elon who just wants to like he says, "I want fresh blood. I want to like turn through people." What's your opinion on this? Like do you want consistency in like your your the top people in your company or do you like encourage turnover? Do you want to keep the the core current product kernel team together? Like how do you think about that?
グ
ちょうど7年超。気になるなら 2,620日。
EN
I think that people's level of experience can change and you can learn unique things, but I think general aptitude is reasonably consistent. And what I mean by that is let's say you want to take the staff route and just go look at MIT and find the smartest people there. You can reasonably figure that out within one semester of like who are the top 50 smartest people at MIT if you ask around and spend some time on them. And generally, people are not recruiting people for their internship program until their junior year or their junior summer, but you you can go and say, "Actually, I'm going to try to find like the smartest freshman and offer them a winter internship or a summer internship and go bring them in and find the smartest and like incredible aptitude people and by the way other freshman when they see the smartest person went they want to go to your company too and you can start to create these virtuous cycles of finding great people. So I agree with with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people in part because it allows you to find maybe something like a mispricing on the market by their junior summer or after they've been working for 5 years it's priced in you're competing straight up with quant firms AI labs whoever you name it people are paying top dollar for folks but that early in career is when people don't have a resume you can start to go and break down actually you can find signs of incredible aptitude drive and potential for performance early on and start to build an affinity. So we try to find those folks and give them a lot more responsibility than maybe they're used to and when they work for quite a number of hours and do great things despite their age and then when they've built experience earlier in your company than they would have otherwise they want to stay they want to build it and that leads me to my actual goal is I want to work very early with people and I want to work with them for a long long long time cuz I think when you've built the trust and you understand you know how to complete each other's sentences without you know the other needing to go do it you're able to rely on each other you're able to move faster and you're able to communicate far more in a shorter period of time which leads you to act with higher higher velocity.
セ
はい。7年前から、経費管理・コーポレートカード・B2B でも、デザインの優雅さへの愛とこだわりがあった。コンシューマー級で、B2B では見なかった水準。今でも語られ、多くの会社にコピーされた。トビをまた引用するけど、彼は「この忌々しい Norman door が嫌いだ」と言う。押すのか引くのか分からないドア。Shopify のオフィスから外させた。「エンジニアリング基準以下のデザインを許せない」と。一つのやり方が、すべてのやり方になる、という考えが好きだ。
EN
It's almost like an ESP that develops. So we were just talking before recorded that few days ago I recorded Mr. Beast episode that can be out for several months for reasons that we can't disclose and what's fascinating about him and I've got I spent a bunch of time with him is he has this thing where it's just like he has almost like a like he there's certain the people who have worked with him so long to the point where they used to live with him and then spend every waking hour with him and he's like now you're talking about 100 hours and some cases, this is like well over even 10,000 hours that they've spent working together. And he says like at his operations guy, I think his name's Tyler, if I remember correctly, he can like walk on a set that just like the one you're on right now that Tyler does, and before Mr. Beast like looks at something or opens his mouth, Tyler's like, "I already know what you're going to say. I did this reason for it, that light's over here for this. This camera's actually here. You think it should be over there, but the reason it's not over there is because I have I positioned it here, it lets me shoot into here." And then he doesn't have to say anything. He's like, "That's exactly what I would have done if I knew that." And he's he's says like it's excessively important. He's like, and then he had a great line. He's like, "You don't get there in 100 hours. Yeah. There is something special about this like I I talked to Charlie Munger. I went to Charlie Munger's house right before he died. And the the fascinating thing we one of the questions that one of these other entrepreneurs who would ask him is like, "Well, how often do you talk to Buffett these days?" And he's like, "We got We talked so much, we got to the point where he We didn't have to call each other anymore."
グ
まったくそのとおり。先日デザイナーの集まりで面白い会話になった。Breville のトースター使ったことある？
EN
Yeah.
セ
ない。
EN
And his whole point was just like, "I already know Buffett knows he used like he used to organize his thoughts with me. Now he knows what I'm going to say." So, he could be like, "Oh, I should pick up the phone and call Charlie." And then have the conversation in his head without actually having the conversation.
グ
デザインを気にするなら買ったほうがいい。エンタープライズ／B2B ソフトの大きな問題は、最初はきれいで優雅なのに、顧客が増え、要件とアイデアが増え、気づけば博士号が要るような災害になることだ。DB をメンテする人が要る。使うのが嫌でログインしたくない。営業・HR・財務——どれもひどい、というのが B2B の通念だ。
トースターに戻る。人に「トースター／レンジに何が欲しい？」と聞くと、「トーストしたい。冷凍ピザを温めたい。オーブンっぽくしたい。ポップコーンも」——気づけばボタンとダイヤルだらけになる。それは「顧客の欲しいものをそのまま作る」ことだ。
Breville のトースターが面白いのは、誰かがトビの Norman door と同じように観察したからだと思う。人がトーストする様子を見ると、だいたい二択だ。スタートを押して、火が足りないからもう一回、か、焼きすぎて最悪、か。だからボタンは少ない。そのうち一つが 「a bit more（もう少し）」。誰も「もう少しボタンください」とは言わない。完璧なトーストが欲しいだけなのに、それが難しいから入れた。
優れたデザインは理解のあとに来る。 誰も Ramp に「クレジットカードが欲しい」「もっといい経費アプリを」とは来ない。経費精算自体を人がやるべきではない。データは最初からデジタルだ。大人として会社の代理で買えるのに、経費は自分でやる——おかしい。コンピュータが考える世界なら、帳簿は自分で締まるべきだ。フォームファクタに囚われず、顧客に届けたいもの——走りやすく、利益が出て、仕事の邪魔をしない事業——を問う。使いやすいと言われるのは嬉しいが、人の時間を尊重するなら、そういう問いを立てざるを得ない。
EN
Yeah.
セ
次の質問。顧客とインセンティブをどう揃える？ ヘンリー・フォードの好きな一文は「金はサービスの結果として自然に来る」。顧客への奉仕に集中すれば金はついてくる、と。1〜2ヶ月前のイベントで君の右隣にいて、Ramp のマーチの袖を掴んで読んだ。We win when our customers win. それが本当なら、どう揃える？
EN
It allows, I think, a much more pure pursuits of the mission cuz you understand why like what each other are pursuing, what that mission actually means, what the impact is if you're successful, and you also know what you are excellent at, and you can take uh and push forward, and what you can rely on another person to do with you. And I I think it leads to these effects where you see some companies when you have a really strong culture, you have a really strong uh trust. It's not necessarily that the talent level is different, it's that in every single hour, the amount of throughput that organization gets is radically higher. Uh and so, I I think some form of both is what we're trying to pursue. And then last, look, I I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization uh is if there are folks who are getting paid similarly, have similar ownership, and are just not pulling their weight. Because I think it leads to this like very tough quite question, and and fair one for folks of like if I'm busting my ass and working super hard and like, you know, giving up on all the things that that that I am and like you're not you know, there's all these folks free riding and you're not enforcing high standards. Why should Why should we obsess so much over reaching our higher potential? This organization doesn't doesn't seem to demonstrate a real respect for the pursuit of higher and higher standards and an intolerance for anything less than giving your best. Like ultimately, I want to win, but what motivates and drives me and most people at Ramp is this belief that every day we can wake up and actually get a little bit better, drive a little bit more impact, get better at the things that we do. I think when you have an organization filled with people who share those set of beliefs, iron sharpens iron, you build better products faster and and so, you know, my whole job, like I don't believe I'm the smartest person at Ramp. Not even close, sadly, at this point. My job is to try to create the conditions for people to do their lives work and that involves finding great people, making Ramp the kind of place that people want to come and do that great work and then once they're here, ensuring that they're able to do incredible work, make decisions quickly, see if they're right or or wrong fast and get products into people's hands and move. That's my job, is to unblock these other people.
グ
うちの6つのバリューの一つだ。会社はみんなバリューを持つ。小学校にもあった。でも嫌いだったのは20個あって一つも覚えられないことだ——もし当時の管理職が聞いていたらごめん。創業当初から、「全員が本当に同意する、ごく少数のことは何か」を聞いた。全員が強く感じていなければ、いいアイデアではあってもバリューではない。
創業時のトップレベルの目標は、プロダクトについて顧客が何ドル使っているか、何ドルをブロックしたか、会社から出ていくのを防いだか、経費・帳簿締め・請求書払い・利回りを取る資金移動に何時間使っているかを測れるようにすることだった。だから会計ソフトに繋いで真実のソースを持ち、資金を動かし、「何ドルを止めたか」「何件の経費を自動化したか」を明示的に測る。
毎月やることは、スコアボードを見て、合算で顧客にもっと金を節約させたか、もっと時間を節約させたか、個社の体験は良くなったか悪くなったか、を問うこと。作るプロダクトはそこにラダーで戻る。たとえば加盟店名のマッチング自動化。カード明細は今でも多くの人にとって読めない文字列だ——「UBR\*478」みたいな。財務の人がピボットテーブルで「Uber に今月5万ドル」と翻訳する時間の無駄。顧客の財務チームがまさにそれをやっていたから、測ったあとに自動化した。
1時間節約したら、その1時間を2万社に横展開し、機能を足して複利にする。7年後の今日、Ramp の顧客はだいたいこう言う。「思ったよりずっと時間を節約した。予想外の領域でも。SaaS の解約後、カード上でその加盟店を無効にしたら、引き落としが通らなかった。」社内ではそれを宗教的に追って、毎月良くしている。それでも Ramp はまだ十分じゃない。無駄と無駄な動きを、もっと削れる。
EN
Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade [music] and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like [music] Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker [music] anywhere in the world, so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. [music] The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. [music] With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere,
セ
「スコアボード」という言葉を使うよね。チームにはどう見せる？ Ramp 内に本当のスコアボードがある？
EN
[music]
グ
ある。内部ダッシュボードにいつでも行けるし、社内エージェント「Ramp research」に何でも聞ける。特定顧客で何ドル・何時間節約したか、一覧で見せろ、と。実質はデータテーブルだ。
EN
we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world."
セ
パソコンのダッシュボードの中？
EN
Deel is trusted by over 40,000 [music] businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to That is deel.com/sendora.
グ
そう。
EN
Ramps was 6 years old 7 How many years right now? I know you do the day thing, but how many years?
セ
壁に巨大版を出したことは？
EN
It's just over 7 years or 2,620 days in case you were curious. There you go.
グ
壁にもある。Slack のいちばん大きなチャンネルにも出る。毎月話す。新規見込み客の最初のスライドでも、顧客数や移動金額だけでなく、組織が何ドル・何時間少なく使えるようにしたかを話す。
EN
So, 7 years ago and you guys had this from day one where like, you know, you're doing expense management, corporate cards, B2B, but you guys had a like a love and insistence on like elegance of design, almost like a consumer level that you didn't see in B2B software, which is still talked about to this day and has been copied by many other companies. Sure. But you got I think that just speaks to you like well well, if we're if we want to have excellent standards, I'm going to quote Toby for the third time in this podcast, but he even goes, "I hate these goddamn Norman doors." And I had to He has thick accent. I was like, "What What is that?" I didn't know what it was. And it's a door where you can't tell if you can push or pull. Exactly. So, he's like, "I can't have shitty design things." So, he had them removed from the Shopify offices cuz he's like, "That design falls below the engineering standards that I'm trying to get to like I want spread and like we have to adhere to." And I love this idea of like the one the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
セ
データを常に前に置き、従業員に見せ続けるのはすごく大事だと思う。Citadel のケン・グリフィンのエピソードで、イェールかスタンフォードでの講演だったと思うが、Saudi Aramco からアイデアを得た。変数が20個では多すぎる。油をどれだけ掘ったか、出荷したか——最重要の一握りを本社の巨大スクリーンに出した。ケンは当時リスクの問題を抱えていて、監視すべき一握りを特定し、シカゴのオフィスの巨大スコアボードで劇的にリスクを下げた、と。逃げられない常時リマインダーだ。
EN
It's totally right and it's funny like a group of designers were were were hanging out the other day and and I found myself in a very funny conversations. Have you ever used a Breville toaster?
グ
それだ。結局、人は新しい複雑さと新プロダクトが好きで、世界は変わる。それでいい。ある意味、会社はフィクションだ。どこかに届出をして「今日から法人だ」と言い、ソファに二人と口座に少しのお金、というだけでも。そのフィクションが数百・数千・数万人に育つなら、共通の目的があるからでなければならない。全員の合計が、誰か一人より速く遠くへ動かせる何か。
リーダーの役割の一部は、「どう測るか」を断言することだ。毎日ベストを尽くし良くなろうとするなら、前進をどう理解するか。正しいスコアボードは何か。そこに途方もない時間を使う。Ramp が100年後に正確にどう見えるかは分からない。でも100年前も、人は1ドルと1時間からより多くを欲しがった。100年後も、形はどうあれ絶対に欲しがる。
EN
No.
セ
それはベゾスの、「変わらないもの」を特定し、そこに何十年も投資する、という話だね。Amazon の最初の3つ——より安い価格、より広い品揃え、より速い配送——顧客はこれからも欲しがる、と。
EN
You care about design. You're meeting all these people. You should buy a Breville toaster. Uh so, uh one of the big problems, right, in enterprise software and a lot of B2B software is it starts out clean and elegant. There is a bunch of businesses who love the product. Uh they start serving more customers and they have more requirements and they have more ideas. And before you know it, you end up [snorts] with these like disaster of B2B softwares which require like, you know, a PhD to learn how to use uh these tools. Um people who will maintain your database. Uh they're horrible to use and as a result you never want to go login and you can kind of name uh what are the software is and uh for sales people, for HR people, for finance people, you name it, they're horrible. That's uh I I think uh a lot of how people would describe B2B software. Let's Let's go back to toasting, right? If you were to go ask people what do you want in a toaster or maybe in a microwave, they might say, "Well, um I like toast but I sometimes I I I want to reheat pizza. Um I should have like a reheat frozen pizza mode. Uh or maybe um you know, you're you're cooking stuff in you want it to be more like an oven uh or you want to make popcorn and it's in you know, a toaster/microwave and all these kind of things." And before you know it, you end up with these toasters filled with buttons and buttons and buttons and knobs and dials and it's super it's super crazy, right? And I think that that is quite literally asking customers what do they want and building exactly that. The Breville toaster I find is very very interesting.
グ
それだ。世界はすごく変わっていて、この10年のテーマや執着していることについても話せる。でも、永続するブランドを作るならタイムレスにフォーカスしろ、という考えには完全に同意する。これは人生で最後の会社にしたいし、一生これに取り組みたい。このものを作るのが好きだ。
EN
[snorts]
セ
ファウンダーに会うと、いつも最初に聞くのは「これは最後の会社か？」だ。良いものは全部複利になる。一昨日のディナーで、ある人の息子に会った。その人は77歳くらいで会社を約50（百万？億？）で売った。22歳で始めて、同じ会社で55年。洞察の密度は、ああいう会話に勝てない。
EN
I think there was an incredible designer there uh who thought about things maybe like Toby did with with the Norman doors. What he started doing is try to observe people toasting things. And if you watch people toast things, what they actually are doing it basically falls into two categories. You hit start and either uh you've undercooked uh the toast and you need to put it back in for another cycle or you've overdone it and it's like you need to start over and it's like horrible. And so, if you look at that, there really is only a few buttons and one of the four buttons I think on there is a button called a bit more. The reason it goes back to that that is actually one of the most dominant things and no one would ask you, right, for a bit more. They just want the perfect level of toast and it's hard to kind of know that and so they built that in. And I think that great design is following an understanding. It is like no one is coming to Ramp saying like I want to buy a credit card or can you build me a better expense app? Like I don't think people should do expense reports. It's crazy. All the the data is digital in the first place. You were you're an adult, you know, who's, you know, allowed to buy things on behalf of your company. Expenses should do themselves, right? If we have a world the computers can think, your books should close themselves, right? And so a lot of what we're trying to do was not be stuck in the form factor of what is the product we're trying to solve but like what are we trying to deliver for customers? We are trying [snorts] to to deliver a business that is easier to run, that is more profitable, that is not I don't know, distracting you with like at work. And so I'm happy it's manifested in terms of people saying like Ramp is easy to use intuitive, but like I think if you actually respect people's time and care about what they're doing, like
グ
それだ。深い層で物事が見える。傷跡と失敗が、もっと効率よく動く力になる。
EN
[snorts]
セ
歴史を通じて人が繰り返す「今度は違う」という言明には、すごく懐疑的だ。大抵は違わない。先日マイケル・デルともっと時間を過ごした。19歳で始めて60代。あらゆる技術革命を生き抜いてきた。「マイケル、今度は違うのか？」と聞いたら、「Yes. 今度は違う」と笑って言った。素晴らしい会話だった。
君の意見では——一緒に時間を過ごしてきたから答えはだいたい分かっているが——AI は組織の形を変える、よね？
EN
you have to be asking these kind of questions. You have to be interested in these kind of products.
グ
すごく深い話だ。いちばん高いレベルから。AI はビジネスの基礎と教訓を全部捨てさせるか？ 毎月エンジニアに会う。一方は恐怖で「終末、ビジネスの終わり」。もう一方はラボへの執着と深い愛。「他に何をやる価値がある？ AGI がすぐそこなら会社を作るべきか？」と目がくらむ。
歴史は面白い教訓をくれる。例としてエアコンを。外は95°F（約35℃）だ。でもエアコン産業の大泥棒男爵家の話はしていない。一方、僕はラスベガス生まれで、エアコンがなければあの街はない。マイアミも同じ。エコシステムで生まれた価値は、技術を発明した人が捉えた価値を遥かに超えた。
AI は人生でいちばん革命的な変換の一つになると思う。産業革命を超えるスケールで、財を豊富にしたようにサービスを豊富にする。人工の一般知能を世界のために作るのも面白い。でもより面白い問いは、知能が豊富で、アクセス可能で、安い世界で、何を作るかだ。エアコンのような「退屈」なものでも、以前は不可能だった都市ができた。
ある意味、君も僕も一般知能の一種だ。進化したサルの脳で、何千年も見てきた。一般知能はものに金を払うのが好きだ。他の知能を雇って仕事をさせる。支払いは、リソースと仕事を管理する分散台帳の一種だとも言える。知能が爆発し、かつてなくアクセスしやすくなれば、支払いも爆発する——人、人の代理のエージェント、エージェント同士の購入。1ドルと1時間からより多くの価値を取るための、より良い基板とフォームファクタが要る。だから今フォーカスしているのは、人がやること・買うものだけでなく、トークンに向かうドルまで管理する足場とシステムを作ることだ。
EN
This leads me to another question. How do you align incentives with your customers? One of my favorite lines in the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford. He says money comes naturally as a result of service. So in his organization he's like we're going to focus on serving the customers and the money will take care of itself as long as you do that. Me and you were at an event, we were talking at an event together, I don't know, like a month or two ago. You're sitting to my right. I look at you're wearing like Ramp uh merch and I like grab your your your sleeve because I wanted to read what was on it. It says we win when our customers win. So I believe that to be true. So how do you align the incentives of your company with your customers to make sure that stays true?
セ
Token Spend でやっていることを話して。すごく面白い。
EN
It's one of our six values and a lot of companies have this idea they want to have values. Everyone has My elementary school had values, right? Um and um what I didn't like about values at my elementary school, um sorry if any administrators are listening to it. There was like 20 of them and like I couldn't remember any of them, right? And what [snorts] we tried to do at the very start of the company was ask like what are the things the very few things that all of us really agree with. And if we don't all strongly feel this and agree this like it's a nice idea you can go pursue it but it's like not an actual value, right? And so one of the top level things we wanted to do at the start of the company was set a goal that explicitly measured for the products that we put out there, could we measure how many dollars are our customers spending? And how many did we block? How many dollars did we prevent from going out of their company? How many hours do they spend doing expenses or closing their books or paying bills or moving funds to earn higher yield? And so we both it's part of why we connect right to a company's accounting software to have kind of a source of truth as part of why we move funds and then we explicitly create measurements on how many like how many dollars did we block? How many expense reports did we automate? All that. And then all we do each and every month is look at the scoreboard and we ask did we save in aggregate customers more money? Did we save them more time? And for individual customers, did the experience get better or worse? And our job is to make sure the products that we build ultimately ladder back to that goal. For example, automating merchant matching or being able to go and take like often if you look at your credit card statement today for most people it's like a string of text and it's inscrutable. It'll say like UBR star 478 and you have finance people whose time is wasted running pivot tables to tell you oh that's Uber and we spent you know $50,000 this month at Uber. With Ramp part of why we built that was we discovered our end customers their finance teams were just going and trying to do all these transformations and they say oh we spent money at Uber. Here's what they send. So, part of what we did was after measuring, right, where were people going to spend their time, we built software to go and automate that for people. Okay, we've saved an hour here for them. We've saved this hour for 20,000 other uh, companies. How do we start adding more features and compounding? And so, you flash forward to 7 years today, any customer you talk to who uses Ramp will tell you like, this thing saved me way more hours than I expected it to. It saved me time in areas I didn't expect. I was able to block transactions so when I canceled my subscription to some SaaS software and I deactivated that merchant just on the card, it didn't go through. We are tracking those religiously uh, across the company to try to go and get better at it each and every month. And as good as as good as Ramp is, I don't think it's good enough. I think we can do a lot more just to cut out waste and wasted motion.
グ
はっきりさせたい。これは難解な SF トピックじゃない。Anthropic を見てほしい。3年前に最初の1ドルを稼いだ。収録時点の噂ではランレート売上が年500億ドル超。OpenAI と合わせて1年後を保守的に見ても、年3000億ドル超——米国 GDP の約1%がトークン支出——に達しうる。
この種の支出は、他のソフトと違い限界費用ゼロではない。ジョブごとに限界費用がある。CFO が給与とベンダーを管理する哲学を持っていた世界に、第三のメガカテゴリ——組織のためにトークン経由で行われるナレッジワークをどう管理するか——が生まれる。
フォーカスする理由の一つは、顧客がこの領域のすごいアーリーアダプターだからだ。Ramp が毎年売上を倍にしている理由は複数あるが、このカテゴリ成長もその一つだ。顧客は支出をうまく管理しようとしている。顧客の一つは Uber で、CTO が公に、ある四半期の AI 予算を年の最初の数ヶ月で使い切った、と述べた。5年前、この種の支出を予算化した会社は誰もいなかった。多くは高リターンだが、すべての支出が等しいわけではない。
顧客のために、どこに使ったか、Opex か R&D か、誰が使ったか、リターンは何か、を理解する手伝いをしている。いま支出の多くはフロンティア・モデル——商業的に使える最先端——に集中し、いちばん難しい問いに使う。面白いのは、ラボは蒸留を嫌うが、一強ではない、ということだ。すごいモデルの数週間後に、ほぼ同じ、あるいはこのタスクでは同じ、が出てくる。
観測では、最新最強が出てから約6ヶ月で、ほぼ同じでコストが100分の1くらいのオープン寄りのモデルが出ることがある。高度なエイリアン知能でメールを直すのもいいが、もっと安いモデルにルーティングできるかもしれない。だから僕らや他社がフォーカスしているのは token spend management——何が要求され、何が出力され、より良いルーティングはないか——を、エンジニアリングから一般財務へ広げていくことだ。
もう一つは agentic spend（エージェント支出）だ。ある意味、君も僕も会社の限定エージェントだ。出張ならホテルと Uber とディナーは取れるが、気分で200万ドルのフェラーリは買えない。CFO や取締役会の承認が要る。ニューヨークで撮影しているこの美しい The Mon との提携があるが、Ramp で働いていて The Mon を予約したら、君は喜ばないだろう。
EN
A question on the scoreboard, they use the term scoreboard. How is this presented to your team?
セ
たぶん喜ばない。よほどのディールをクローズしたなら話は別だが。
EN
Yeah.
グ
言いたいのは、組織が支出権限を委任する構造を作ったのがプロダクトのコアだ、ということだ。すでに組織はこう言っている。「毎年1000万ドルのソフトを自動更新している。いまのプロセスは部門の誰かに『まだ要る？』と聞き、1000ライセンス中誰がログインしているか聞くことだ」と。
数年後——正直もう見えている——はプログラム的に追跡する。1000シート買って何人がログインしたか。シート単価100ドルと言われていても、Ramp は市場と比べて高いか安いかを示せる。やがてエージェントがエージェントと交渉して、会社のために買うようになる。支出を統治しているのはポリシーで、それがソフトになる。一方で、あらゆる仕事のためのコンピュート支出を管理し、もう一方で、知能がリソースを配分する——帳簿を閉じるだけでなく、最も価値ある用途にドルが行く OS を作る、というのが向かっている方向だ。
EN
Is it an actual scoreboard inside of Ramp?
セ
ジャレッド・クシュナーと面白い話をした。和平合意の交渉で、いちばん小さな一歩から始めない。いちばん理想的な状態から逆算する。フェンスを狙うほうが、小さな一つを止めるより成功する、と。Ramp が新技術を取り入れて進化するとき、いまはないが理想のプロダクトは何？ 文字どおり self-driving money（自動運転の金）？ シートやソフトではなく、仕事を買う？
EN
Yes. Yeah, every I mean, you can get it any any minute or or second of the day if you go on to our internal dashboards or um, you can query uh, you know, ask one of our internal agents for Ramp research any question you want. Uh, how many how many uh, dollars uh, and hours did we save a specific customer? Show me all the ways in a tally. But it effectively it's a data table.
グ
すごくうまく言った。今日誰にサービスしているかから。多くは事業主と財務組織だ。大学で会計・財務を学ぶ友人の夢は、「意味のあるテーブルに座る」「重要な原因にリソースを配る」「事業を理解させ、より良い意思決定をさせる」「すごいプロダクトを作る」だった。そのクラフトを学んだあと目覚める現実は、「いや、仕事は経費と請求書処理だ。先月やった流動性ロールフォワードや財務予測を今四半期もまたやる。時間の80〜90%は機械を回すための定型反復だ」というものだ。データはツールに散らばり、運用が難しい。
僕らがやっているのは、一つにツール数を潰して監視しやすくすること、二つに、支払いを生成・移動し、監査証跡とポリシーと全財務データを繋げたツールで、「このドルは稼いだか、中立か、無駄だったか」を知ることだ。すると仕事は、後ろ向きの時間がほとんどで面白い部分が少ない、から、顧客は誰か、何を作るか、次の1ドルはどこへ、どう配分するかに大半の時間を使える方向へ変わる。
理想に近いのは、低価値のルーチンは済ませ、Ramp をオンにして、小さな事業主が——すごいポッドキャストの作り方は知っているが、帳簿も最安のベンダー払いも運転資本の最適化も気にしない——Ramp を雇って、一緒にやってもらうことだ。トビのように起業をもっとアクセス可能にしたい、という信念を共有している。技術とツールは、ミッションと夢と目的の追求を力づけ、企業生活の大半を定義する退屈な仕事に詰まらせない、という位置に人を置くべきだ。
EN
But it's inside a dashboard on their computer?
セ
ここまでの話は、外から見ると意外な事実に繋がる。君やカリム（共同創業者カリム・アティエ）が公に話したかは分からないが、Ramp の本当の競合として見ているのは、外の人が一緒に並べるいつもの顔ぶれじゃない。答えはラボだ、と。なぜ？
EN
Yes.
グ
うん。突き詰めると「Ramp は何を売っているか」だ。初期は金融サービス提供者と同じ枠に入れられた。理解できる。資金を動かすし、得意だ。レガシーツールから来る人も多い。銀行や資金移動に関わる機関がコアで売っているのは、多くの場合お金だ。リワード、より大きなリベート、運転資本、ローン、口座の高い金利。価格・ブランド・サービス、あるいは「いちばん多く返してくれる」説得で競争し、妥当なマージンを取る。
Ramp は最初から珍しく、売ろうとしていたのは時間だった。資金は動かすが、痛みは経費精算の時間の無駄、締めの tick-and-tie の時間の無駄だった。お金の移動のまわりのナレッジワークとビジネスプロセスを自動化し、価値を増やす。ある意味、ナレッジワークとインテリジェンスをサービスしている。ラボは、その種のサービスのいちばん比較可能な提供者だと思う。労働にもなりうるし、別の形のナレッジワークにもなりうる。
すごく興奮する。すごい競合がいるとエネルギーが出る。iron sharpens iron。より深い問いを強制し、怠惰を許さず、毎日・毎週すごいものを作れと迫る。人生でいちばん楽しい時期の一つだ。5四半期連続で売上成長が加速し、マルチビリオン規模で事業を倍にしている。その部分もすごくエネルギーになる。
もう一方で、慎重に考えないといけない。コミュニティは指数の上にいる。数年前、段落がだいたい通じただけで衝撃だった。数ページ後、100ページのドシエで脚注の幻覚にケチをつけている。減速の兆しはない。これらの組織の能力を本当に内面化すると、「知能が機能的に無料に近いなら、何がユニークで、どう持続的・差別化された価値を足すか」が問われる。
だから深く入り、違う種類の価値を提供する必要がある。やり方の多くは、お金の移動が実際に起きるレイヤーであることだ。数ヶ月前に無駄だったと事後で分かるのではなく、出ていく前にドルを止める循環と結合組織を作る。資金の動きに繋がった OS のように感じる。でもラボは、あらゆる種類のビジネスにとって、これまで見た中でもいちばんエキサイティングな競合だと思う。
EN
Have you ever thought about putting it on the like a making a giant version on the wall?
セ
起業家に対してすごく楽観的なケースを出してくれた。最高だった。時間をありがとう。
EN
It's it's it's it's it's on the wall. Um, it's reported out uh, in the the the largest channels in Slack. It's things that we talk about frankly every month. Um, and it's part of why even too, uh, even on the first slide, uh, if we're meeting with a new potential prospect, we talk not just about how many dollars, how many customers are using us, how many dollars we move, but how many fewer dollars and hours have we helped organizations spend. Yeah. And he's like, you know, there's a there's not like you said, if you have 20 variables, it's too many. Six, five, whatever it is. So, Saudi would put up like the handful of things that were so most important, like maybe how much oil they drilled that day or how many they shipped or whatever the case was. And it was a giant screen in their headquarters. And at the time, I think Ken was having an issue with risk, and he identified a handful of things that we need to monitor, and he he said he drastically uh reduced their risk by just putting it I think at the time Citadel was in Chicago between these giant dashboard like scoreboard in the office where everybody could see it. It's just constant reminders so you can't run from Yeah, you're speaking to this Bezos idea where it's like That's it. That's it. And look, there there there's so much that's changing about the world and you know, we can talk about where what we're focused on and obsessed in and and some of the themes of of this decade, but I totally subscribe to that notion of you should be focusing on the timeless if you're trying to build an enduring brand. Like I want this to be the last company ever work on and I want to work on this for the rest of my life. Like I I love building this thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. You know, and you'll you'll see thing at a at a deeper level of depth and you know, it's fun. You know, you learn you know, all all that the scar tissue you have, the mistakes you made I think allow you to move with a lot more efficiency and and movement. Hm. I think this is a super deep topic. And And maybe we'll just start at the highest level of like I I think you'd ask of like, "Does AI throw out all the fundamentals and lessons we learned about business?" And I I say this because like I'll encounter engineers every month, right? On one side, you have people who are like, you know, terrified, right? This is doom, and it's going to be kind of the end of business as we know it. At the other, you see almost this obsession, right? With the labs and deep love of them, and look, I think there's something incredibly revolutionary going on. I think that some of the labs are going to be uh some of the best businesses created of all time, but the potential of AI is so great, it can blind people and ask is is it worth working on anything else? Should we even build a company if AGI is almost here, around the corner? And I think history offers some pretty interesting lessons around this. And maybe to use an example, let's talk about air conditioning. It's 95° outside. We're not sitting here talking about like the great robber baron, you know, families of the air conditioning industry, right? And these great family fortunes of people who created it. And at the same time, like air conditioning, like I was born in Las Vegas, that city wouldn't exist if not for the air conditioner. You live in Miami, right? There's entire ecosystems. And think about the value that was created out of the ecosystems far exceeded the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology. And I think with artificial intelligence, don't be wrong, I think that this is going to be one of the most one of the most revolutionary transformations in our life. I think on the scale beyond the industrial revolution, making goods plentiful, and it will make services plentiful. I think it is interesting to go work on creating a general intelligence that is artificial for the world, but I think one of the more interesting questions uh to be asking is in a world in which uh intelligence is very plentiful, in which intelligence is accessible, in which intelligence is cheap, what should you build? What kind of businesses are now possible? Uh just as there were cities and things created that were not possible before, maybe the air conditioner and something as dull as that. I think that there entire things that we can go do uh when you have intelligence that this is this is accessible. Come back to us. In some sense, like you and I are a form of general intelligence, right? We have kind of our evolved monkey brains um and and and we've kind of seen over the course of thousands of years how does a general intelligence like to do things? And it turns out that general intelligences like to pay for things. They will hire other types of intelligences to go do this. And you can think about payments almost as a form of the like a distributed ledger to manage resources, work, you know, there's records around this, and there's a reallocation of of these types of resources. And I think part of why we are so interested in payments in in this kind of world is I think when you have an explosion of intelligence, and it's more accessible than ever, I think you will have an explosion of payments, whether it's people or agents on behalf of people, or even agents in general making purchases. And I think you'll need a better substrate and a form factor to go track and control and get more value out of every dollar an hour. And so, a lot of what we're focused on right now is how do you build the scaffolding and these systems for organizations to manage not just the dollars they're spending on people and things, but the dollars they're ultimately spending towards resources, towards tokens. Uh like I want to be clear, like this is not just some esoteric science fiction topic, right? Like just to observe it, like I don't know, let's take Anthropic. 3 years ago, they made their first dollar. Uh while we're recording this, um the rumor is uh the run rate revenue is over 50 billion dollars a year. And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs, are on track to do in revenue in call it a year's time, I think it'd be reasonably conservative at this point to say they're going to pass more than $300 billion a year revenue, which is like 1% of the entire gross domestic product of the United States is spent on token spend. And this type of spend, unlike other types of software, does not have no marginal costs. Every job you're doing has a marginal cost. And I think in a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, "I'm just going to you know, manage my payroll, and I have a philosophy about how I'm going to decide how much to spend on that. I'm going to manage my vendors." I think there's going to be a third mega category created around how do we manage knowledge work that will be done on behalf of organizations and done through these tokens. Part of why we're so focused on this is our customers are incredible early adopters of this. There are many reasons why Ramp is doubling its revenue each year. This is one of them, the growth of these categories. But these businesses are trying to better manage the spend. Like one of our customers is Uber, who, you know, is prior to going and adopting, but they they had mentioned that their CTO had had said publicly that in a few months of the year they had spent the entire budget they had allocated for AI spend in a quarter. No one has budget like I can tell you 5 years ago no company budgeted for this type of spend. And by the way, like a lot of this is really high returning, but not all spend is treated equal. And so part of what we're doing on behalf of our customers is helping them understand where did they spend on? Was this opex spend? Was this R&D spend? Who spent it? What was the return on that? And I think the really interesting thing that's happening right now is look, most of the spend is concentrated in frontier models, right? These are sort of code word for the most advanced model that is commercially accessible and maybe use this for your most difficult types of ask. And the really interesting thing going on and and as this is going to you you have this this the labs don't like the the notion that these that these labs can be distilled. As you've noticed it's not one super model, you know, there's a great model and a few weeks later this company comes out with a model that's almost as good or this company has a model that's as good as for this task or that and it's constantly kind of moving. And what we've observed is about six months after the latest and greatest model comes out, you'll have an open suite model that is just as good and maybe costs right 1/100 to go and use it. And so it begs the question of, you know, you can use this advanced alien intelligence to edit your email, but perhaps right you know, you you could route these tasks to these lower cost models. And so part of what we and others are are focused on is delivering services like token spend management, right? So go and observe what was requested, what was the output and were there better ways to go route this type of work as it's moving outside of just engineering to general finances. And so that's a major area. There's a gentic spend. One way of thinking about this is like you and I in in some sense are limited agents of our companies, right? If I'm on business, I have the limited agency to book a hotel and take an Uber and go to dinner, but I can't just buy like a $2 million Ferrari because I feel like it. I would probably need the CFO and maybe the board to sign off. Or if I worked with you, we're we're lucky enough to have this partnership with the Mon so they let us film here when we're in New York in the beautiful Mon. I don't think you would appreciate if I worked at Ramp if I was booking the Mon hotel. The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from and today that team includes people and agents but most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data. So when you ask AI to write an email it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month. And that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready. And when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch. It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over a billion dollars in valuation grew their businesses on. And now, HubSpot for Startups offers the service at up to 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups. I think that's really well said, right? I'll just start with like who we serve today, right? A lot of our customers or uh business owners and finance organizations. And I think like I I remember meeting a lot of friends, right? Who are studying accounting and finance and you know, back in college like I remember that the things you hear from them like the dreams they had is like, "You know, I want to go be at the table where it matters, right? I want to be allocating resources to causes that are important. I want to help people understand businesses better so they can make better decisions. I want to create great products. uh I want to do things that are really meaningful. And you go study this kind of craft and trade of of of accounting, finance, whatever it may be. And then you are really awakened to the reality that's like, "Oh, no, no, you're not doing that. Your job is you're going to do the expenses. You're going to go and like take the bills and you're going to go process them. You're going to go rerun this analysis that we ran last month for, you know, a liquidity roll forward or financial projection again for this quarter and you're going to spend like 80, 90% of your time just on wrote to recurring tasks because the machinery is so hard to operate. There's so much data split across all these tools today that is very difficult to operate. And part of what we're doing is one, just collapsing the number of tools that organizations need so it's easier to monitor, but two, ultimately when you have better tools that are generating, moving the payments, but also like have the audit trail, know your policy is connected to your your full financial data so it can know this dollar did it did it make you money or was it neutral or did you waste money by spending on this? Then suddenly, all right, the job starts to change from most of your time is looking backwards and very little is actually in the interesting stuff to like finally, if you're a business owner or if you're leading the finances of an organization, you can actually spend most of your time on like, "Who is our customer? What are the great products that we're developing for them? Where should the next dollar actually be going and how do we actually allocate the resources going forward?" And so I think for me, where this turns into and where it gets interesting is your point is like, "Yes, like it is it is selling like this wrote low value work is done for you." Yes, you can go and turn on Ramp and all of these things maybe maybe you're a small business owner and you have an obsession maybe you you know how to make a great podcast, but you don't care at all, right, as to like, "I don't know how to keep books or pay, you know, vendors at the lowest cost or optimize my working capital. And you can hire Ramp to do that for you and with you. And that's what we're working towards. Like I I I I I share a lot of common beliefs with folks like Toby who are trying to make entrepreneurship more accessible to people. I think people should be put in a position where technology and tools empower them to pursue their actual like missions and dreams and purposes versus getting clogged with all the tedious work that tends to drag most people down and I think defines most of corporate life today. Yeah. Yeah. So, if you get down to it, there's this question of like what does Ramp sell? And I think early on we were bunched in with a lot of financial service providers. And and I understand that comparison kind of on the face of it. We move funds. We're we're we're we're quite good at it. And people are often coming from legacy tools and I I think that these [snorts] banks at the core, a lot of what financial institutions or folks engaged in the movement of money are selling to their end customers is money. Right? They're selling you money. They are selling you rewards, right? A larger rebate on a purchase. They are selling you more working capital. They are selling you a loan, right? Um they're selling you a higher interest on your accounts and they compete often based off of price or brand or service or some form of who can convince you they're giving you the most money or for back and keep a reasonable margin. Ramp was very unusual in that from the get-go, really what we were trying to sell you was time. We would move your funds, but the pain that people had was like it was a waste of everyone's time to do expense reports. It was a waste of time to go and have to tick and tie for every payment to close your books. Really what we're trying to go do is is automate and do the work around the money movement. It is all of the knowledge work and the business process that we are working to automate and help you get more value out of. In some sense, it is a form of knowledge work and intelligence that we are serving and servicing for you. And I think that labs are in some sense the most comparable provider of this type of service. I think in some sense it could be it could be labor, but it also could be knowledge work done in different ways. And so, one, I think it's incredibly exciting. I actually get very energized having like great competitors and having great organizations to compete with. I think iron sharpens iron, and it gets forces people to ask deeper questions, to get off their ass and not be lazy, and to go build something great every single day and week. And so, I think I'm having some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. Like we've had five quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while you know, doubling the business and doing it on a multi-billion dollar scale. And so, that part of it has been incredibly energizing. At the other side of it, you need to think really carefully of you know, these organizations and I think community is on the exponential. Just a few years ago, we were all shocked when AI could generate a paragraph that sort of made sense. It might have had some typos or things that were weird, but it seemed sort of human. You know, just a few years later, people quibble, you get a 100 page dossier, and some footnote is offered hallucinated. And I I I don't think there's any sign the stuff is slowing down. If you really internalize of what are the capabilities of some of these organizations, I think it calls into question of if you assume intelligence will be functionally free in some sense, what is unique and how do we make sure we're adding durable and differentiated value compared to these organizations. And so look at it's it's it's super exciting. I think it leads us to go really deep and ensure that we are providing a different sort of value. I think a lot of how we do that for organizations is by being the layer where money movement is actually occurring. You know, I think in some orgs maybe you can determine months ago we wasted funds and with Ramp we're building kind of the the circulation and connective tissue so you can stop dollars from leaving before they ever go out. And so I think that it tends to feel much more like an operating system in connecting to the movement of funds, but I think it they are some of the most exciting competitors for all types of businesses. I think we've ever seen.
グ
こちらこそ、デイビッド。ありがとう。
EN
Yeah, I think putting that data in front constantly reminding and putting in front of your employees is super uh, important. There was this uh, I did this episode on Ken Griffin from Citadel. And he's I think he was giving this lecture at Yale or maybe at Stanford and he thought it was interesting. He went to he actually got the idea from Saudi Aramco. That's it. And and it comes back to like at the end of the day, like people love complexity in new things and new products and and the world is changing. There's there's nothing wrong with that. Like in some sense, a company is just a fiction. You make some filings somewhere and you say, "We're a corporation today, you know, even though we're just two people sitting around a couch, and we have a few dollars in a bank account." Right? And if these fictions are intended to grow to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands of people, it should be because there is some common purpose. There is something that in aggregate, the sum of the parts of all the people working together should be able to move something further faster than anyone alone could do. And so, I think part of the role of a leader, frankly, is to go and assert like, "How will we measure ourselves? If we are seeking to be our best and get better every day, uh how should we think about that? And how can we understand our forward progress? What is the right scoreboard?" And so, yeah, we we spend an incredible amount of time uh on that. And at the end of the day, like look, I don't know what Ramp will look like exactly in 100 years, but I I think it just as it was true 100 years ago, people always wanted more uh out of every dollar and hour, I think people will absolutely want it uh in 100 years in whatever form that may take. Uh and so, I think Yeah. the one of the smartest things a a company can do is like identify the things that don't change. And if you could he identified three at the beginning of Amazon and if you could invest heavily in them decade after decade because you know the customer is going to want lower prices, more selection, and faster delivery. You know I was just at a question. Like I talked to founders and they want to tell talk me tell we talk about their company and like one of the first things I always ask is like is this the last is this your last company? It's just like that's the thing I'm super interested cuz then all the good things in life come compounding and like I get I was just at this dinner two nights ago and ran into the son of this guy I wound up being able to spend an hour with and just sold his company for like $50 I think he's like 77 or something like that and he started the company when he was 22. So that means he's a 55 years of experience in the same company. It's like those conversations are so full like insight per minute like you're not going to beat that at all. [snorts] I am very skeptical of the statement that humans repeat throughout history that this time is different. Usually it's not different. I just was spending more time with Michael Dell the other day and I figured okay, you started the company when you were 19 you're in your 60s. He's had to manage and thrive through all these different technological revolutions and everything else. I go, Michael, is Is time different? He goes, yes. I [laughter] time is different." We had a wonderful conversation about it. So, I want to go back to AI has to I would imagine in your opinion, and I've spent enough time with you, I think I know the answer to this, but like I think it's going to change the shape of your organization. Is it not? Talk about what you guys are doing with Token Spend. This is very interesting. Probably not. You know, unless you close some great deals in which case we can talk what I'm getting at is like we we built a structure for organizations to delegate authority to spend on certain types of things is like a core to how the product works. And already today there are organizations that are saying, "You know what? Like we auto renew $10 million of software every single year. And my process today is ask somebody in like this department or that department to go review and say like do we still need it?" And they need to go ask it's like hey we're paying for a thousand licenses who's logging in or not. And I will submit to you that in a few years and frankly already we're seeing organizations do this are tracking this programmatically, right? They'll go and pull the data and see all right we paid for a thousand seats how many people actually logged in? This rate that we're getting maybe we're getting charged $100 per seat. Ramp can show them actually your price per seat is lower or higher than what the rest of the market is doing and I think that very quickly you'll have agents negotiating with agents to buy things on behalf of companies cuz in some sense it's just your policies that people are applying to govern what you're going to spend on and I think that's going to become software and so part of what we're working to do is on one side manage the spend where you are actually just paying for types of compute for all types of work. On the other side allowing intelligence to allocate resources for you, you know, not just digitally log and help you close the books but over time can you start to build an operating system that allows organizations to frankly make sure the most worthwhile cause and the highest return on the dollar gets the dollar. I just had this fascinating conversation with Jared Kushner and he talks about when he's doing these like he he you know, he's negotiating trying to negotiate these peace agreements. He doesn't start with like, "Okay, let's like do like the smallest thing the smallest thing we could do. Let's start with the most ideal situation and work backwards from that." And he finds he actually has more success swinging for like the fences than if like, "Hey, I just want you to stop doing you know, this one little thing." My question to you is like as Ramp evolves and these new technologies uh you're taking advantage of all the the new latest technology uh developments, in your mind then, like what is it's not there now, but it like what is the ideal product? Is it literally self-driving money? It's like you're not buying seats, software, it's you're buying work? What is it to you? So, I think a lot of what we've talked about so far ties to this fact which is surprising and I don't know if you you you or Karim have talked about this publicly, but who you actually look at as the competitors to Ramp is not the typical people, you know, other people on the outside kind of group you together sometimes or compare and contrast you with. Your answer to that is that the labs. Can you explain why? Thank you put forth a very optimistic case for entrepreneurs. This is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to do it. Thanks a lot, David. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.