The Pomp Podcast - #676 Building A Fintech Unicorn with Eric Glyman

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

Eric Glyman is the Founder and CEO of Ramp, the only corporate card and spend management platform designed to help you spend less. He has raised approximately $700M for the company in debt and equity, which helped the business become valued at more than $3 billion. Previously, Eric founded Paribus, the price-tracking app that was acquired by Capital One in 2016. In this conversation, we discuss selecting an idea, testing your assumptions, fundraising, scaling your business, hiring great people, disrupting incumbents, putting stablecoins on the balance sheet, and listening to customers.  ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= My friends at Coin Cloud will give you $50 in FREE Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any of their 4,000+ machines. Use promo code POMP to get your free Bitcoin. For details or to find your nearest Coin Cloud machine, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp Coin Cloud has been serving customers since 2014 and has established itself as the world's leading digital currency machine (DCM) operator. More than just a Bitcoin ATM, Coin Cloud machines make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin and 30+ other digital assets with cash. To get your $50 in free Bitcoin, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp ======================= MiamiCoin is the first token to be released by CityCoins, a community-driven project built on Bitcoin. CityCoins aims to give people around the world a new way to support their favourite cities. The protocol has already generated over $7 million dollars in donations to the city of Miami and continues to grow every day. If you want to get involved Follow @minecitycoins on Twitter to stay up to date with the project. Visit chat.CityCoins.co to join the community discord and contribute to the movement.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Eric Glyman is the founder and CEO of Ramp, the only corporate card and spend management platform designed to help you spend less. He has raised approximately $700 million for the company in debt and equity, which helped the business become valued at more than $3 billion. Previously, Eric founded Paribus, the price tracking app that was acquired by Capital One in 2016. In this conversation, we discussed selecting an idea, testing your assumptions, fundraising, scaling your business, hiring great people, disrupting incumbents, putting stable

coins on your balance sheet, and listening to customers. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope that you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. That's right. Their team makes it easy to start mining wherever you want, at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. Through the Compass marketplace, retail miners can have access to mining hardware with similar prices and purchase plans as the world's largest mining companies. Compass miners own their machines, choose whatever mining pool they

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Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Let's start with just the story behind Ramp in terms of like, where did this idea come from? And then how did you guys actually get it off the ground?

Totally. Yeah. So, so Ramp today, when we came out was known as the corporate card that wants to help you spend less. And I'll go back into that, what we mean by that and all that. But a lot of it just came from, you know, I grew up in a stucco house in Las Vegas, was very obsessed with this idea of how do we save money constantly. And years ago, we had started this company called Paribus. It helped consumers save money online. Basically, if you shopped at Amazon, the price of what you bought dropped in price, whatever it was, we helped you get the difference. We launched this years ago. Within a year, we had a million customers and got a live-streaming offer from Capital One to buy the company. And so pretty

quickly, we started to see, one, you can turn data into savings for people. If you actually are a company and work on people's behalf, you can do a lot. Next, we were a part of the credit card division. And so while we were saving $100 million a year for customers, we were seeing this business that was massively profitable and really smart people there were thinking a lot about how do you get customers to spend a lot more money and maybe they could earn more points, more cash back, whatever. Meanwhile, my job was savings. I would talk to customers and ask them, are you looking for more points, for more cash back? What it was and people would really say, I'm actually looking for more in my bank account. What was crazy is both sides were trying to outsmart each

other. People at the bank were trying to keep costs down. Customers were trying to make more. it was a little bit off. Like, honestly, I think incentives were pretty misaligned. And last, I've been involved in the startup world for probably about six, seven years now. And it started to see time and time again, the bigger companies got as businesses grew, the less efficient they became, the more wasteful they came with money and time. And so it kind of just hit us of, look, like saving money is great. A lot of people want to do that. They want to be more profitable. They want to have better businesses. The credit card business is fantastic and yet it's so misaligned what if there was a credit card and frankly

software that could help businesses run better um spend less money spend less time um and so real quick just so that uh people understand who this is for right like i'm obsessed with this idea of uh two things one you can give people products that they already know that they need they're already used to using you don't have to change consumer behavior totally and then kind of in the background what you can do is you can basically use a bunch of data a bunch of kind of best practices, et cetera. You can codify it in software and then implement into a business. Is this just for like large corporations like Microsoft's, Amazon's, IBM's, or could small businesses use this as well? Or like, how do you think about like, who is this for?

Great question. So we do have public companies. One of the companies in there, you mentioned is using it. We can, we can scale all the way up to that. We also, you know, it can be two people, a couple of laptops, people just getting started. And I would say that the average business on ramp today could be a small mid-sized business anywhere from 25 to 200 employees is straight, straight and narrow. And I think that it's really two use cases. It's one for business owners who want their business to be more profitable, who want to replace what today is a lot of broken sets of software, a credit card, expense management software, accounting, often someone in finance who's doing a lot of work at the end of the month to chase people down,

get stuff done, or could actually be finance teams. And so really as companies are scale, it's that in the last stakeholder too i think for most um people work at uh any kind of company most people hate their their um uh expense reporting process and so it's just a much better user experience too but it's really for business owners and finance teams okay and then once somebody says okay cool i think i need this product like what does the product suite look like today in terms of this is really just helping business owners save money and then we'll talk a little bit about the lessons you guys have learned how individuals can actually implement some of this in their life but what is the product suite today yeah so um so we we call it on the

face of it, now with multiple products, we call it finance automation. And if you want to get a sense of being go to ramp.com slash pump, we have a special offer for everyone. $500 on the first statement, all the software is free, we'll get into it. But so first and foremost, I think what made us famous was we now offer the fastest growing corporate card in America. And so we can offer limits all the way up to millions of dollars per month for companies, 30 day cycles, get cash back on the card, lots of controls, everything. There's a sophisticated corporate card. Behind that too, there's integrated expense management. And so one of the rules for small businesses and large is the IRS says you need to keep all receipts above $75. We built that right into

the software so we can collect receipts automatically from cardholders, from businesses, all that. We do reimbursements. So let's say that an employee makes an expense on their personal charge. You want to hit them back. We do that. Bill payments, which I'll get into. And then accounting automation and so effectively you hit it exactly what we're trying to do is make running a business setting the rules the systems orchestrations one system to cover all of that and what it ladders up to is that the average business on a ramp we've been studying and measuring this a lot spends about three point three percent less than the business that doesn't you know interesting

I'll get to how we do that and you know a lot leaner and high-performing finance teams are able to close their books an average of five days sooner and it's easy. It takes about 15 minutes to sign up. Okay. So to give people a sense of like how quickly this is caught on, uh, when did you start the company? How much money have you guys raised? And then what is the company valued at the last round? Yeah. So, um, and genuinely, I hope this is all useful too. So today is day 927. I look this up this morning before we go. If you want to know how obsessed they are, they literally count in the days. We don't count the minutes, but we look at every day. 927, day 927. Yeah, that's right. So we just turned two and a half. It's all very,

very new. We're now processing into the billions of dollars per year of transactions on behalf of cardholders. We've raised between equity and debt about $620 million. Jesus. And the company is valued most recently at $3.9 billion. So in two and a half years, you raised almost $700 million and you got a company that's value just under $4 billion. This is not the first time you've done this in terms of build a company and find success or kind of product market fit. What are probably the one or two lessons that you've learned the last two and a half years for founders to understand in terms of how the hell do you do it? Right. I think people hear that and they're just like, Oh my God, you raised $700 million. Like it's a $4 billion business.

Like that. That's incredible. Like what is the magic trick? There are no tricks, but like, what is the thing that you've learned the most that you can kind of point back to? Yeah, like the 927 day thing is fun, but I hope it drives him 928 days ago. Like there was literally no business. Like things can happen very, very quickly with the right, a couple ingredients. And I think first, it's just like clarity of purpose and focus. What does your company exist to do? And very discreetly, how are you going to get that done? Next, I think, is really about listening to customers. I think what shocked us was we had this entire industry. Every competitor was focused on this program that was get customers to spend more money, earn more points. We talked with about 150 founders, finance teams before we shipped a single card. And often the most common thing we heard was cards are fine, but I actually want a better business.

I want to spend less. And so actually listening to people and trying to back into what are they saying? it sounds really simple, but people don't do it often. Next, I think when we were going before we raised any money, we there's this old adage. If you ask for money, you get advice, ask for advice, you get money. I'll come back to that. But I think it's very related to the second point. And then last, I've worked at companies where they set these long term annual goals like I want to five X this year. I want to do 10 million dollars in sales or volume. And like I don't don't um i don't buy that like a lot of how we do this and part of why we we know like what day it

is is we we just set simple goals of this week we want to grow a certain amount that's it it's a little bit of incremental process of progress and if you can compound over time things can really take off but it's little progress by little adds up this last point is really important because i think this applies not only to building a technology company but also we talk a lot about personal finance and investing etc is helping people understand that you can do this as an individual as well. So compare the two ideas. Like we could say today, we're going to start a business one year from now. We want X, Y, and Z metrics to be hit versus, Hey, by the end of the week, we want X, Y, and Z metrics to be hit. Why is it that focusing on the short term

kind of, uh, um, goals is more important to you than those longer term would end up being kind of loftier ideas. Yeah. I'll start with, I think even, uh, so maybe that's seven years ago when I started the last business. Our business plan was, you know, it was me and my co-founder Kareem. We had six, six months of savings. We've been working for a couple of years and we moved to an apartment in Brooklyn and we had to make this thing work. And I remember just feeling completely overwhelmed. We knew we wanted to build this huge business one day that could help people save a lot of money, would do all this cool stuff. But there was a million options between like here and the end vision of it. And, you know, if we wanted a 10x, we could do anything. We could go buy a bunch of

ads. We could go try to do press. We could go try to fundraise so we can go and afford different stuff. We could work on the product. It was almost so overwhelming. The complexity of like all the different choices you could make, it made it almost hard to operate. But if we constrain things and we said, actually, all we want to do is add, you know, find 20 new users for our product this week. It's a lot more straightforward. And you can start to trade off and say, what's the highest likelihood of with my time? I can either pick this, pick this thing that will take half of my week, but we'll certainly get there. Maybe this other thing, that's a 10% shot of working. But if it works, I can actually blow past this goal and start to really trade

things off in a practical way. And without doing that, it gets really, really easy to one, let excuses kind of run into how you're operating every day of like, of course I'm doing it. It'll pay off, but it's, yeah, I think what, what being able to measure it and show progress is important. and then two just to drive focus each and every week it adds up yeah and then when you actually start to look at the goals how do you pick what that goal is is it something that you back into are you guessing like like one week from now two weeks from now like how do you pick yeah it's uh so so i let's back up like i think it's first of like how do you even set goals in in the first place and what's it about and i think that for us we had this this this version of the industry

where people were approaching this, we felt in the wrong way. They were building businesses that worked for the business, but not for the customer. And we said, we wanted to help. If we can help our customers spend less money, spend less time, we can align ourselves to that. So let's first figure out and start to, I think even before you start and before you put yourself on that treadmill, to try to understand from first principles what's going to be important. And so we said, let's save people money and time. We talked to enough people and did that. We started to ask, we know where we want to go. We've got the vision. Now we need the plan of how are we actually going to go and save companies money, save them time? What does it mean? What are they spending money

on? Where are they wasting time? All that. Once we started to have the product iterating and going, what made it easy and part of how we grow as a business and monetize is when people actually use the card, when they actually use the software, they are able to operate. We earn a percentage through interchange. And so the optimization was much simpler for ramp. The goal was if we can make things that are useful, would save people money and time, we think, we hope they would use it more. And so our goal very early on was actually around counter-tutorily, like just purchase volume, actual usage. And so we said, how can each and every week, can we grow the amount of people who are using it, grow depth with it? We had a lot of different degrees of freedom. We

could try to get new customers. We could try to work more closely with existing customers. we could try to make things more useful and we would try to trade off and try to debate what can we do this week that would help us do one of these things and what has the highest leverage let's say what can i do with 20 of my time that will have 80 of the results um we're not always right we're in fact often very often wrong um but we try to do it that way the founders of a business like this obviously you've had success in past uh kind of iterations and then uh, and this one as well, maybe the executive team as well, they usually are highly successful. They've done it a bunch of times. You go out, you recruit them. When you hire an entry-level

employee, kind of somebody right out of school or this is their first job or whatever, uh, they may not have the experience or, or kind of the track record of success and having worked at a place that's seen how this works. How do you transfer that knowledge or kind of that framework or that mentality and kind of culture to those new folks that you hire as well? Because I always think about it like jeff bezos at amazon is kind of the ultimate you know higher uh end of the hierarchy and he's using the employees and the and the corporation as leverage to build what he thinks is into the future and he has great people etc but when you talk to somebody he's got to get from jeff bezos all the way down to you know one of his 1.5 million employees and try to reiterate

hey here's how we do things at amazon how do you guys think about that yeah i think he has a lot of great questions, um, all in one. So first is even in like in, in hiring and who we try to look for. Um, there's a lot of different philosophies. I think in most parts of businesses, they're trying to operate to certain margins, keep things going to certain way and look for like very well rounded people. Um, we tend to look, we're trying to do things in extremely compressed periods of time. And so often what we're looking for is people with, they might actually have real deficiencies in certain areas. I do in many others, completely disorganized. A lot of things you wouldn't want me touching, but certain really strong spikes. And so often when we're interviewing

and trying to meet people, even people just at a college or even hire a lot of interns all the time too, we're trying to figure out, was there some kind of extreme accomplishments made or done that was unbelievable? And they'll vary. Like one was, I think someone when they were 15 had made a private minecraft server and as a 15 year old paid for college like that's crazy that they were able to do stuff like that other people like learn foreign languages extremely quickly others built a following online certain things that might be indicative of they have some extreme talent try to find that and push towards it next based on the goals that we're trying to do like don't have somebody who's um you know you don't want to you don't have uh you know ask michael jordan to play

baseball like let him play basketball put people on the right stuff whatever are the areas that like they actually specialize in try to map out based on your goal what can they do and help them be successful i think that's who gets disrupted by this like it's very obvious people like this right and i think your uh insight as to everyone else wanted people to spend more money earn more points it was almost uh kind of like uh i can trick you to get on the rat race right or get on the rat wheel and then by the way i'm gonna make more money because you're spending more money yeah you all are going the opposite way and you're saying look we actually want you to spend less money which means that you'll like us more uh and then we'll figure out how to kind of help you with

all of your other financial activities as well. Who gets screwed? Is it just like the regular credit card companies or who ends up being on the other side of this? So there's a couple that are direct and there's some that we think will be more interesting over time. So I think that the obvious ones are the big incumbent credit card companies. And so most of our competitors have founders who passed away 100 years ago, some been around since 1850. And these things have enormous market share. And it's crazy. When you look at your credit card, it hasn't changed for like 30, 40 years. It's the same piece of plastic. Maybe it's metal. Um, you know, if it's extra deluxe and, uh, does the same things, you swipe it, you have very little

controls. It hasn't really evolved. And so the obvious ones, um, probably about a third, um, of our customers come from American express. Um, people who are using that are looking for something to upgrade from their business. Um, it can be folks like chase city. Um, you get on the list. Um, the next class, um, is actually expense management software. Um, so for people who filed an expense report before, turn something in. It's pretty painful. Either you have to go at the end of a month, scan your receipts, put it on some platform. Usually it takes days for your receipt to actually get in the software. With Ramp, it's immediate. And so folks like Concur and Expensify, about 90% of our customers have fully replaced those. And I think last are some of the categories

like bill payment software. So I think bill.com is one where we see a lot of customers are coming over from today. I think the more interesting part of it for us over time beyond that, let's set the rails in place. Let's have the software be really easy and intuitive for customers to use. A lot of the goal and the reason for why we started Rampant the first way was we felt that in business to business payments, there was a lot of price discrimination. I think the really common experience for people when they buy software online is you can try this thing. Um, then if you're a growing company, contact sales, if it's enterprise contact sales and what's contact sales means, it means they're going to try to figure out how much you can

pay and charge you that. Um, and, um, it's insane. I'd be like a bunch of crazy stories around that, but I'll put it this way. That is exactly what, by the way, that is exactly what they do. Contact sales definitely means we are going to mark this up as much as we possibly can and still have you purchase it. Yeah. And they're, they're very good at it.

And every time you think you're getting a good deal, you think you've outsmarted them, you get a win. They're making a lot of money and they're able to get people with their willingness miss to pay. In theory, that's fine. What's been wild in seeing this business, when you have credit cards, you have bill payments, expense management, you're collecting receipts and invoices, you can see very, very vividly that people are getting ripped off. Some people are paying a lot less, others getting a charge more. Frankly, every company on some vendor is paying more than some other company. And we think that there's a lot of opportunity to actually disrupt price

discrimination. And I think that for me, one of the businesses I love as a consumer is Waze. And before Waze, there were some huge businesses. One was MapQuest, for people who remember it. And the map was great. It was good to know where you were going, but it was a lot better to know there was a traffic jam and you should take another route. And I think there's going to be a similar opportunity to actually flip the tables on vendors who are trying to rip off businesses, Small business owners, big business owners, whatever it is, to actually do this, take funds back to businesses so they can put it into hiring more people, paying people more, going home earlier, spending less time, building more profitable businesses. And so I think a lot of the ethos is actually how can we be on the side of people who are building, business owners, people who are creating, so they can go after their purposes and missions and not have all the waste. Yeah. You have some interesting news, maybe we'll call it, around your guys' balance sheet. You told me this. I was like, wait, what? I need to understand this. So explain the composition of your balance sheet in terms of what assets you put the balance sheet in that we can talk about why you're doing some of this.

Totally. No, this was a recent conversation, both we've been having internally and also even at the board level. Look, there's a lot more cash and assets than we've ever had. And I think a lot of our ethos is about helping companies be more efficient. And, you know, to have hundreds of millions of dollars just sitting purely in cash felt not optimal. I'll put it that way. Flex. Yeah. A couple hundred million dollars. go ahead it's just it's like we get what it is hey listen we we do not condemn success around here we celebrate success i i i couldn't imagine or fathom what like hundreds of million dollars actually look like and it's crazy when it's sitting there like wow i have it in a checking account this is nuts this is nuts and so i uh there's different ways to look at it and so

i think one of the philosophies that um makes sense so i think there's defensive ways to use balance sheet and there's offensive. And we'll look at, I think both. So from a defensive perspective, like I think, you know, there is the base reality of that's how we fund our company and operate. We need to make sure we're good stewards of it. We take care of it. And so part of it, and I think the vast majority of it, there's different people in portfolio management talk about this theory called a barbell portfolio composition, where you're very heavily in highly safe parts of your balance sheet, where the vast majority of your balance sheet is. But with part of your balance sheet, you seek yield. You take a little bit of risk for more return.

Part of what's jumped out to us in this market has been, and I think it's probably very obvious to people who listen to your show, is I think not just in the crypto, but even in the stablecoin world, the yields on stablecoins where it's effectively really interesting, well-constructed products that are backed, that are securitized, that effectively are taking risk-free trades effectively between today's prices, the future prices of certain cryptocurrencies and taking the spread. So effectively, so long as the counterparty is solvent, it's backed, it is a risk-free trade. You can earn yields of like 6%, 7% annualized on one-month, three month tenors. And so with part of our balance sheet, we actually do keep it in stable

coin to earn the yield. Yes. How do you think about what percentage of the balance sheet? Right. Because I think when many people hear this, if you're in the crypto world, you're like, oh, I personally do some of that. So it makes sense. I wouldn't think of a business doing it. If you're also in part of the crypto world, you may say we're used to publicly traded companies recently have got a bunch of press for putting it in Bitcoin because they're looking at it as a kind of an asymmetric bet, right? You're basically saying, look, we want to participate in the industry, but we're not trying to go get hundreds of percent of appreciation. We're going to just get that six, seven, 8% yield on the stable coin because that's part of a barbell. This is the

kind of safer part, our strategy. So is that like a 1% allocation or is that like 90 or how do you think about like from a balance sheet composition? Yeah. I mean, we're, we're still early in it. I mean, I, I, I think about it for today, especially in, in early parts, like, like single digit percentages. And when the yield is that high, it turns out it still leads to a lot of power. But I mean, I think even to the, you know, when you look at the history of companies and corporates, people used to buy headquarters in real estate. People used to have corporate memorabilia, sometimes corporate art. We're not doing any of that. But look, ultimately, when you have cash, like it is an asset. And I think it becomes, you know, well, it's not the core of the business.

And ultimately, I think to your question of how do we think about it, the vast majority really is operating capital. But for the parts that are non-operating for a little bit, how can we not take crazy risks? We do need to make sure we're doing right by shareholders. We do need to make sure that the business is fundamentally sound. But in building a business over time to be a fortress, to make sure that things are well-backed, I think it's a strategy that actually makes a lot of sense. And I think is becoming much more, it's early, but much more common. The conversation at the board level around this, I'm assuming there was, we can do nothing and stay in kind of a traditional treasury management type position.

We could go do super extreme things like buy corporate art or whatever. Then there's maybe like, maybe should we put some in Bitcoin? Maybe we should do some in stable coins. Where along that risk profile did people tap out? Like, were people like, okay, like that's too much risk. We don't want to go do that. Is there like something that you remember in that conversation? You know, I think that for us, we've, you know, we're dipping our toes in, you know, and so we're not like, you know, we've got this amazing piece of art. You've got to see it.

You didn't put 50% in Bitcoin. Yeah. And look, I think, you know, one of our board members we love, like, you know, Keith Verboy, here in Miami, amazing person. I think a lot of the core element, and this is still true, like Ramp will never become a great business buyer balance sheet strategy alone. It is one small part of it. And so I think that a lot of the conversation was more of what is being responsible for our own capital. We want to be thinking about this a little bit. Let's start here. We're not trying to go extreme back to business and focus on it. And so, you know, I wouldn't say that we really have thought about and trying to push the boundaries where we certainly don't want to have a, you know, anything too complex. But a meeting, think about allocation, come back to it, look at it periodically. But I think back to the same principle of letting things compound, setting up systems in place that are designed to get you where you want to go long term was really what we're trying to do. What's so fascinating about this is we recently went and looked at the average interest in a savings account.

Now this is not corporate savings because this is more for the individual, but if you were to just take, call it 10% for easy numbers and earn seven or 8% yield on that 10% of your balance sheet, uh, for the entire balance sheet, you would still be two X or more higher than the average interest rate in a savings account. Yeah. Right. So it's like, I think it's like 0.03% or something is the, uh, is the actual amount. So it's, it's pretty crazy when you start to kind of think through, um, just how bad

other options are compared to something like this totally Jojo what questions uh do you guys have so uh mine would be around like personal finance and you can answer kind of what you're comfortable with but uh my question would be right like you had some personal success before starting ramp uh with another company that you founded and I assume building a four billion dollar business takes up a considerable amount of your time as you would imagine uh so like how do you think about personal finance and your personal investments is it something that you actively spend a lot of time on? Or is it something where you just say, hey, look, ramp is my highest upside kind of investment that I can make. I'm going to focus all my time on this and let that take care

of itself. It's really the latter. Yeah. I mean, I think really, I mean, no one gets more time far as I know. And I think being able to focus on what are the areas that can really compound how to spend all the time. Like I spend, you know, I don't day trade. I very rarely touch stuff. And if I do make investment decisions, usually it's like, you know, it's a half day, you know, a week, a month, something like that. Take a look at the portfolio, set it, leave it alone. I mean, I do think that trying to deal like there are great and proven principles where certain thoughts around asset allocations were to invest, not just leaving stuff purely in boring products or doing nothing and not reevaluating from time to time. I think that that's a mistake. But spending time

actively managing, at least isn't my, you know, where I find most success in what I do. So I try to, for me, I like to operate, spend most of my time doing that. And I spend a little bit of time on construction. Yeah. So be prudent, be kind of knowledgeable about it and attentive, but not spend too much of your time. Definitely. And I think for most people too, I mean, I think a lot of people listening and creating or building businesses are pretty young and they have what would for a lot of people is rare, which is time and ability to focus and energy to work. And I think really thinking about what can I do today, this week, this year, who can I work with to build, I think is an incredible way for most people to spend their time. And so I try to spend

most time thinking about that. But yeah, I think you're right. You can't totally ignore it. That's for sure. John, what questions you got? Yeah. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate you are dropping bombs on the audience right now. So I'm curious, a lot of people are young that watch this show. A lot of people have ideas, are trying to start businesses. What are some mistakes that you see people do starting business and yourself? And then how do you avoid those mistakes going forward? I think it's an awesome question. So before we started the last company and even before starting Ramp, there's a lot of temptation for a lot of people who are really excited. I think it's never been easier to start a business. Capital has never been more available. And I think

a lot of people are suddenly really excited to be an entrepreneur. And like a decade ago, it was fine, but it wasn't like that celebrated. And I think that one of the worst mistakes that a lot of people make when they're starting out and working at a career is they try to come up with ideas in the abstract and they go and say, what's the biggest industry in the world? Or like, where is there waste or some big opportunity, something like that. I want to go and solve that. And I think that just trying to come up with ideas is really, really hard and dangerous because you can convince people of the market size, of the TAM, of the size of the opportunity alone, and you'll want to go and build against that. And you'll spend a lot of cycles never really finding product

market fit. I think that one of the most important things that an entrepreneur can go from instead of trying to come up with ideas is to start paying attention and noticing things. And so when we came up with uh the idea the first company we did it actually happened from like a personal frustration where i was with a group of friends we were over where it works we wanted to like take our first vacation in like a year book this flight the next day it dropped in price by you know a hundred dollars and i was like this is really weird this friend had asked me um could you send me the flight deals uh details i want to book it myself um and join you guys in the trip and i like couldn't believe it and so most people when they encounter a problem um or some kind of

issue in industry, just kind of be like, ah, whatever, that's frustrating. I'm going to move on. Um, I had a little bit of extra time that, that, that day. And also like I'd been, I'd wanted to, to come up with a company for, for many, many months. And I said, let me, let me roll with this. And so I spent, um, you know, a couple hours researching, going into it. It turned out at the time, most retailers, airlines, everything had a policy that if you bought something, the price dropped later, you could get the difference back. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. Um, and frustrating. I want to go do it. So I spent like an hour on the phone with customer service before you knew it. We had, you know, a hundred dollars times eight, a thousand dollars

almost back for everybody. And I just sat there and I'm like, wow, like I wish I knew about this. I wish I had some way to kind of take this. And I just started pulling at the thread and there was lots of twists and turns and ways to go. But I think what's super important in any kind of business is trying to, you know, one, pay attention to real problems, to notice things, to next make something that is useful to one person before you make it for a thousand people. to build a great business you don't need thousands millions whatever customers you can do that one day and it'll come but i think just starting small and in a focused area focusing on real problems um it helps and help you get a lot further well said when you think about that

exact thing of finding an idea and then starting talk about like the propensity for action for actually doing it like how did you know where to go start looking or was that kind of blind luck Yeah. So we this one was definitely luck with the last business. And I worked at a desk job and I was like, OK, this is crazy. Maybe we found the savings on flights. But we had all these questions that we wanted to figure out. We're like, well, how common is it that people would have price drops, the thing that they were buying? Great. If you could get price drops, you know, how long is the period? How much is actually there? Then could you automate it? Maybe you could find all this, but it would be an incredible amount of work. And so we sort of ran these series of experiments. And I actually think a lot of great startups and venture capital is really running these series of experiments. And what we're trying to figure out is if we could actually like three out of our eight core like questions or hypotheses we could answer yes, then we could know we're closer

to getting to this final answer. So actually with the first business, it was something on the side. We were experimenting, I think, for probably six months and we bought a bunch of stuff online on Amazon and it turned out like now I think like half of items dropped in price which in three days of us buying it I think now Amazon changes something like like 70 million prices a day it's really absurd this was 2014 when we were doing this we you know wanted to figure out where we get the credit card data or the card data turn the credit card didn't have enough

information we need to get it from email and once we figured out you could do this you could link with email accounts you could you could track prices and And then last, if you wanted to get a refund, this was the last business you all you had to do was send an email. We're like, OK, we can do this like we can build a simple email app. It'll collect the receipts. We could generate text to send it into the store. They refund the difference and they send a proof of a refund. And then our business that that last business was we charged a cut. And there were similar things, too, with with ramp. We had this idea of business owners want to run their business with less capital, have more time. And so a lot of the core early questions were, first, could we build a credit card in the first place? If so, how? And so we started researching what was happening from an infrastructure perspective. If we wanted to get live, what were the balance sheet requirements?

What were the security requirements? If we wanted to integrate, what were the different methods? Next, OK, we could have a credit card, but could it actually be useful? And so one of the first set of experiments before we launched, we actually started the company and operated for almost a year before we actually launched publicly. And during that year run up, a lot of what we were trying to prove was we could issue cards, we could make closing books easier. So we wanted to design a simple system to text people, to collect receipts back and

all that, and then maybe link up to accounting. And now there's all these sets of software. We're going deeper into finance automation. we're seeing price discrimination, we're helping people save, you know, more than even as possible through interchange, cashback and points. But all we were trying to do was little experiments where if we could prove things along the way, would help unlock that next part of the business, maybe it unlocks the next round of investment where people say, okay, they built a lot in a short period of time, I want to invest more money behind this. It unlocks a really happy customer

who says like, actually, this thing was really useful. I used it because they kept coming into my office and i was like fine i'll try this credit card out but they're like holy shit this actually saved me um uh you know i'll tell you a story in a second about like customers save twenty thousand dollars um on it and told like told other people about it and i think that once you have little experiences experiments you start to earn trust people start to believe more and more and i think a lot of building a business is over time trying to create this um you know not just show value But once you started to do this, create this sense of inevitability. You have the clarity of purpose.

People believe and see you're driving results for people. And so it starts to create this virtuous cycle is a lot of what you're trying to do in an early stage business. You've raised about $700 million for this business. Walk us through, like, what are the best practices from a fundraising standpoint? You had an advantage because you'd already built a successful business. But as you've gone through this last two and a half years to raise $700 million, pretty impressive feat. what are some of like the tips that you have for other folks as they, uh, as they kind of set out on that journey? Definitely. So I think, um, I think a lot of people when they, when they think

first order about fundraising, um, is I want to go with, if I can get this capital, I can go out and build, um, I can go hire these good people. I can run the marketing, get great customers and just go from it. And I think that a lot of, if you talk with venture capitalists or investors, I don't want to say they're lazy, but I'll put it this way. Their favorite businesses to invest in are businesses that don't need their help. Elon Musk doesn't need anybody's help. He's fine. The business can operate.

Things are going to go well. And that is one of the most sought after investment. And I think if you observe that for people just starting out, the question is, how can I build something of a little bit of use with some potential and show each and every week you start connecting the dots and things are happening. There's a product that's out. I call up, there's maybe five customers and people actually like it. You get real feedback and people say, if you build this, I will use it. They use it. And so I actually think one of the best ways

if you can do this is figure out what are some things that I can prove that there's real demand here, that there is real use. And so we didn't raise any money, I think, for the first half a year, just about, of the company. We tried to get things going. We had had some success before. And So we took, um, you know, funds from the last company, um, that we'd made into this. But even then, like when I'd started my, the previous company, I think I had saved, um, I'd been working for two and a half years. It was enough, I think for, uh, I think about five months, um, you know, to go and do this wasn't very long.

And I really downsized to do this. And the whole thing was, was show traction first. And if you have traction, you can start to, to, to bring in others next. I think, you know, if you can, um, bring some traction, I think the next important, the the next kind of key parts are if you can match capital to people who can be really useful to the business, that's really great. And so whenever we had fundraising conversations with venture capitalists, other founders who later invested, all that, we never went into a pitch saying, hey, we're a business. We're going to go fundraise. I'd love to show you why this is

a great investment opportunity. Instead, we said, we're building this. I'm trying to do something specifically useful for you, or I'm trying to do something specifically useful for this audience, I'd love to get your advice on it. I'd love to talk with you about it. Or I'd love to, if it's a business center, I'd love to build something great for you. Can we meet? Over the course of the conversation, it's a give and a take. You start to learn. You hear about their problems. You can see if your roadmap actually aligns. You can get feedback. Sometimes you're right on. Other times you're off. Either way, it's useful. And it could be actually part of a sales process if you're a business-to-business product, people start to build conviction in you

as a person. They see that you listen, that you have good intent. They start to see some of their own ideas and what they're doing, and they get personal attachment to it. And I think back to the adage, you ask for advice and you get money. It's much likelier. Sometimes people ask, like, this is really interesting. What's next for the business? You talk to them about your building. you know you mentioned you know you you may go um raise some capital and say that's really interesting like i want i want you to tell me about it and so it's almost um it's probably elements like like this in dating and things like this too where if you you come in and you it's too clear you're too into it like it's not going to work um but you know play it cool have

a good conversation um much more likely and and i those would be the i think the two big ones and yeah you guys have obviously had a lot of success uh building this business and everything like that. So I'm sure there's been a lot of demand from the investment side. Is there any like crazy story that sticks out of what someone has done to be able to, to, to give you guys money or get your attention? Um, don't say who it is, who it is, unless you're comfortable with it, but what's the story? Oh my God. There's, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of funny, we should do a whole segment where we just have founders come on and tell all the wild stuff investors do. What's the best one i can choose whether to tell who it is or not um so there was one that um this was this

was the last company um which was crazy so if you look back years ago i think it was 2015 it absolutely blew our minds um such a like i shaquille o'neal um uh tweeted about like this was like the very first company we didn't raise like any money i think we'd save like i think personal funding and shaquille o'neal shack tweeted about how he saved a thousand dollars on like a hot tub right which like was like using your product using the product right and how did that happen like basically there was an investor who's like look like this is amazing like we were growing like 20 a week things were going crazy on this last savings product happening it's like like i'm gonna get shaq to tweet about it like i don't believe you like he was like trust me i'm

gonna i'm gonna do it and he texted he texted he texts us back um he's like shaq's gonna tweet about you guys in an hour what do you want this thing to say and i looked around it was there's my friend zach and and kareem and we're like i don't know we're like we're a bunch of nerds like all it's all I knew was like Shaq was in Kazam I like Kazam when I was like eight years old how funny would it be if like Shaq like tweets like Kazam like I'm gonna grant you some wish save on everything you buy whatever and then like I was like this can't be real this guy is talking like he's sorry I don't know if I can say that but like yeah this guy is uh is messing with me whatever and so it takes him this thing back some of the photo and like an hour later this thing

posts and be like totally lose our minds like that he literally says like Kazam like the whole thing It's super goofy. Could you imagine Shaq being like, hey man, who the hell is this guy trying to get me to tweet this right now? Did you see that Shaq recently retired from being a celebrity? I did. You got him before he retired. No, no, no.

But it's, people do, like, I think most people like want to, want to be helpful. Like that was extreme. That was interesting. And there is, there's been a lot of goofy things with Ramp too. I won't go too deep into it. But yeah, look, I think a lot of people, if they're genuine and sincere and they're excited about it,

yeah, don't be afraid to ask. You never know. You can even get people to tweet. How's it working with Keith and Deleon at Founders Fund? They're great. Yeah, no, you're gonna have to elaborate on that. He said that too. They're awesome.

They both sat in that chair over there. Check in the mail. You can say good or bad things. You can make fun of them. You can do whatever. We promise to protect you. Keith, Deleon, we love you guys. But what is it like working with them?

So I love working with the founders on the team. So I think that they found us, it's a crazy story. So Deleon actually met my co-founder, Kareem, playing on Fortnite, the company. And so, I don't know, maybe Deleon can't help it. Like, even if he's playing Fortnite, the guy wants to do deals or something like that. But yeah, they met in a group.

They hit it off and whatever. And later, Kareem was working on something. like come into the office please or whatever so we were going out to sf and we were working on this thing this like credit card that wanted to save people money and we walked into the office and um it was i like i think it was on like the 60s something as day of the company um um actually it was earlier i think it was like the 50s you know whatever go back to it anyway so we had clarity concept there were some people were sent up to use it we'd hired some people um uh we were going to launch the car next week. That night they called us back and they said, we're in,

we're going to do this. And so I think like very clear, very decisive. And I think Keith has a particular way about him, but I think that what I think makes him exceptional. And I think part of why so many companies he's worked with have grown incredibly quickly is he's a very fast decision maker. He has clear principles that he operates against and that when he works with people too, and we were a huge beneficiary of that, he's very, very focused and he helps really hammer into companies early on of, look, you cannot do a thousand things well. You can do one or two, maybe things very, very well. What are these things going to be? How do you make sure you have strong clarity of purpose? Next, when you're hiring and operating, I mean, he was one

of the first 50 people at PayPal, co-founder of Opendoor, a firm, Square was their COO, has seen incredible payments companies, knows the ins and outs of it. And I think that he has an amazing talk, by the way, if you haven't seen it, it's called How to Operate. If you, you know, check it out on YouTube, it's 45 minutes. For someone who's operating a business early stage, I think it's a life-changing talk. And a lot of what he talks about is really about what are the core, how do you think about setting a vision for the company? How do you operate board decks? How do you operate company, evaluate managers, evaluate yourself? And really it's simple rules and almost formulas that you can go through and evaluate with your own business um how are you performing

how are people performing and that's it and so i don't think it's about you know outsmarting the world or freaking everything out it's about true rigor behind building businesses i think he's i think he's great at it i think they're great at it and i think that for people who are really just getting started um in businesses i think there's a few people in the world who can go toe-to-toe with them and part of what i think is so fascinating about this is not only the decisiveness but also, uh, there's like a recipe for it. Right. And, and some of the things change in between, uh, some of the details are different depending on what industry, what the businesses, who the founders are, but there's absolutely a playbook that can be applied to almost every business,

uh, that will drastically increase the probability of success. It doesn't guarantee it, but it increases the probability. Is that what you found working with them? For sure. I mean, and it's very funny. And I think that one of the other, um, I mean, popular early stages, Y Combinator. We'd gone through that years ago, a separate company. And I think that what would always surprise people, they would do these things in batches where you would get, at the time it was 90 companies in a batch. Now it's like 450. It's kind of wild. But the task was grow, say 10% every week, build your business, whatever. But the businesses that we learned a lot from, one was a company selling beauty products online.

another was an Israeli cybersecurity company and we were selling we had a savings app to help people save money like these are completely different businesses but it turns out in early phases of companies there's a lot more similarities and there are differences which is one you're trying to build a product that people want you're trying to reach people out in the world you could market you could do press you could just have things that people get so excited about they just talk about it you're trying to make sure your company is set up right? What bank account do I use? What credit card ramp should we use to help make sure

your business operates really well and efficiently? Whatever. And so I actually think that there is a playbook where there are certain things where if you focus on first core principles, make something people want, try to hire really great people, but give people clarity in their focus, spend a lot of time just measuring, evaluating results, and trying to make a little bit of consistent progress, I think that's really a lot of it. And of course you can get into like, how do you do great marketing? How do you think about great finance? How do you, um, whatever, and lots of little products. But I think that the core principles of how to build a great business have really started to get very well understood. I think over the past 30 years. Yeah. It's

absolutely incredible. When you talk to a potential customer, what's like the pitch for ramp? Like if you just, if I cut this and it's like, here's the 32nd pitch, like what is the pitch to a customer? so I'll give you two versions right so one let's say if you're a smaller a mid-sized business and they're very different and get more interesting so I think that if you're a smaller like someone just getting started it's like you're required by law to have expense management for you know taxable reporting you can't audited even just good hygiene you want to make sure that if you have rigor with what you spend that will compound into what else you do as a company and I think you ask is like look what would you pay for the you know the highest rated um and best expense

management software in the world the software you have to use um uh great how's how's free um how does that sound for you um it's the highest rated is free oh and by the way what if it paid you money what if it got you cash back what if it helped you actually spend less um great what if it actually helped automate your accounting what if it helped make sure you can you can get rid of three sets of softwares that don't really work very well um replace um replace your credit card replace expense management software, replace your bill payment software. Get really space-age stuff. Ramp is the only credit card in the world where you can just block a merchant if you want to do that. Your credit card works everywhere. You can turn a merchant off. No other credit

card can do that. You get amazing capabilities. Why wouldn't you want it? And so for a lot of people, it's look, we grow as a business and make money when you do too. This is software that every business needs, um, uh, we'd love to go to work for you. Um, and so I think that that's the core one. And for anyone who's thinking about it, ramp.com slash pump, um, there is putting it in the chat here. Yeah. Telling people to go when, uh, they can get some, uh, some free, what do they get when they go here? Yeah. So one, um, first, um, you know, we, uh, it's, it's a corporate card. And so, um, you, you know, once you're approved, um, it is a card we limits, um, you know, all small as 10,000, um, you know, as high as $10 million per month that you can use to go,

go buy things, cash back, all that kind of stuff. Um, if you use this link, um, it's a $500 sign up offer. So you get $500 off your first statement. Um, um, and, um, all the other software, um, you know, that, that comes with ramp. So it's, it's, if you use Slack, there's Slack integrations, there's integrations with HR software, with accounting software. Um, we do a lot in terms to just helping making running a business easier. When you start getting to larger businesses, really it shifts from specific products. If you want a world-class credit card, you want great expense management software too. We are really focused on helping automate finance and we are trying to drive an increase to your bottom line is really what it's about. For them,

they're past the point. They have credit cards, they have expense management software, or they have accounting, but it's really broken. I think for a lot of people, once you've worked at a big company, it's like, I hate the software and cards we're using, but it's sort of, it's duct taped together. I know the system, it's all that. And so for a lot of larger businesses, it's finally, it's the change management. It's actually upgrading and helping free people up. So instead of having really smart accounting finance people, instead of just going a few days per month, going and collecting receipts, chasing people down, they can do strategic finance work to actually help grow the business. And I think on the extreme tier, I think it's all

about the just world class capabilities on the credit card side. It's the ability to block merchants, the ability to issue one time cards that can literally only work on specific merchants. It's the collections of receipts automatically. We're coming out, you know, we're in beta now with bill payment software that, you know, our customers have been using it, describe it as just insanely great. I mean, all you do is you would upload an invoice or you can forward it from your email. Ramp automatically, through computer vision, will pull out all of the info. We create a vendor in your accounting software and on Ramp, we pull the bank account details, the routing information, we pull out all the line items and costs, and we make it easy to

auto-schedule the payment and send things out. And so instead of what most companies are doing today, which is you get an invoice, you go type in every individual part of it. You know, it's minutes here, minutes there, times hundreds of invoices. If you can let a computer do that work for you automatically, it's really about giving companies time back and better processes later. I love it. We've never done what I'm about to do, but I just got this idea and we're going to do it and hopefully people like it. So we have two pairs of these Bitcoin shoes left to give away. We've given away three pairs already. I told everyone that we would, uh, if we kept getting the likes up, we would go ahead and, uh, and give out the other ones. So the two pairs, here's how we're

going to pick the winner for this is I'm going to put in chat an exact thing that you have to tweet. And it says, I love ramp. You got to tag at try ramp and use hashtag BBS ramp. And then what we'll do is we'll go in and we're going to pick two people. John's in charge of picking the two people to uh give the shoes to and tomorrow at the beginning of the show we'll tell you who got the two pairs of free bitcoin shoes but in order to get entered to win the last two pairs that's what you got to do real simple and i feel like the ramp twitter account may respond yeah i'm sure whoever the ramp twitter account is about to be like dude what the hell is this nonsense but uh if you go there and you tweet that uh then uh we will go ahead and pick john i'll pick two

people we'll make sure that we get the shoes sound good john i guess she just randomly nominated me do you want no i'm gonna start i'm gonna start giving away stuff and nominating you to pick winners all right that's fine you how about you pick one i pick one no i'll pick them both oh you're selfish tweets are coming in well that that makes me in control as well so that does nice that that does put you in control that's fine all right we're gonna close eric's ears for a second what do you guys think about ramp by the way i'm not an investor in the company i'm not anything i just think this shit's cool right like i wish i invested in the company it sounds like a long way to go on my side to

the company's so great you literally got a no shack i think that the part to me like after kind of talking to you about it right It is that insight of like every other credit card company wants to incentivize you to spend more money. You all have figured out how to incentivize people to spend less money. And to me, that is like the fundamental shift. And when you do that correctly, then you can build a really big business. I think just going back to like mission and focus, over time, it just becomes a collection of people. It's your customer base.

ecosystem, it's very hard to change course. And I think like big companies are almost like a cruise ship where they're very hard to turn. You can't really change what it's about. And I think the mission really matters. And most, not most, I think, I think in financial services, a heavy percentage, maybe the majority are not aligned with their customers. And I think that customers often know it and they're trying to outsmart or get a better deal. You know, these businesses and these businesses too, sorry, are trying to outsmart their customers and trying to be more profitable. And it is crazy that when you actually say, forget it, like I want to be aligned. I actually want to do what is in the best interest of customers and actually line up

my bottom line to that, the different things that people build. I mean, we are so much younger than most of our other competitors, but we built a lot more features that actually save people days in their work that actually save people money. And it's shocking that companies that are hundreds of years old have never done this. All they've done is said, look, here's some points and you can go to these fancy hotels and don't look at the fact that everything is huge inflation in points and it's worth less and less each year. That's the innovation. You get more points and things like that instead of, look, it's great to get 1% back, but it's a whole lot better to not spend the hundred dollars in the first place it's a hundred times better um and you can do a lot more

if you set the right mission and aligned focus out i uh i forget who said this to me but they said it just like the light bulb went off they said uh everyone spends all this time trying to trick the credit card companies like they literally have a hundred thousand engineers across all the companies sitting there trying to trick you right like like do you really think you're smarter than all the machine learning and data scientists like they're gonna get you right and so rather align yourself with somebody who's obviously trying to get you align yourself with somebody who says look our whole goal is to save you money yeah no and i think that's it's uh i don't know i i saw i saw the the twitter thread you had a couple days ago i almost i almost want to ask

how many points you have that are you know just sitting and yeah i'm happy i got i think i'm gonna get rid of them uh you should use them i think i was convinced to uh to get rid of because of the inflation i don't think i and look i you know i tend to pretend to at least be somewhat sophisticated uh and i started looking at the inflation levels of the credit card points and And I was like, actually, I think that we should start an entire movement for everyone to spend their credit card points immediately. Right away, yeah. Like, the only thing worse than U.S. dollar inflation

is credit card point inflation, right? We should break down one day next week, we should break down the actual credit card point inflation. It was scary. Yeah. And I was like, all right, the points thing, like, let's maybe try something else. For sure.

So, any last thoughts from you guys? No, thanks for doing this, Eric. This was ramp.com slash pomp. go uh go check it out and then um anything that people can do to help you guys right now are you guys hiring or anything we we are i think i think today we have actually um we're hiring for 50 roles right now across every like everything which is great we're trying our best doing everything we can but across really every role and skill set um engineering product design marketing sales um you name it i mean if you're um i think the other you asked about advice for

people you want to start companies i think the other advice is like if there's a company that really working well, go join it. If a company is doubling every three, six months, you name it, it's an incredible place to learn, incredible place to get opportunities. And so we'd love to, if you're interested, ramp.com slash careers, or shoot me a note on Twitter. I'll make sure my DMs are open. If you know any business owners, if you are a business owner, if you know of someone in a finance team is a little bit overworked, it'd mean a lot. You know, all we, you know, we really try to work incredibly hard to actually save our customers money and time. And so we'd love to go to work for you or anyone you care about. And look, if you have creative ideas,

want to reach out, I'm here. I really enjoy this. I got to ask, because they're going nuts in the chat. We ask everybody, what's your Bitcoin price prediction by the end of the year? Oh, my God. I, you know, I try to say out of the prediction, because, look, I've been I've been holding man i've been been hodling since 2013 so one of the i i think uh with the last company we ended up doing this giveaway with coinbase where effectively we gave away 50 bitcoin i hope everyone um this was in 2015 i hope everybody kept it i do you gave away 50 bitcoin in 2014 yeah it was 2015 2015 gateway 50 bitcoin for your company for what so this was crazy. This was actually back in September of 2015. I can try to find this. But at the time,

Coinbase, still a startup and company, had just raised money. And Bitcoin had crashed in price. I think it was around $200 per coin. And Coinbase was doing this giveaway where there was a referral program where if you referred somebody to sign up for Coinbase and they bought $101 of Bitcoin, they would give you the referrer $75 our company at the time was all about saving people money and so we reached out to coinbase to say we've got lots of people um who love saving money we think cryptocurrency is is fascinating as great people should know about it would you be comfortable um if we split if we split um the refunds or if we said look like you know you can instantly make $37.50. If you buy a Bitcoin, a few days later, we'll get $75. We'll send you over half and that's

it. And a lot of people did. It turned out a lot of people, they were like, sure, let's go for it and whatever. And so it ended up being, I think, on the order of 50 Bitcoin that were given out. So look, I think Bitcoin is incredible. Beyond it too, I think though RAMP doesn't today operate in the cryptocurrency space, I think we watch it closely. We think it's fascinating. And look, if it becomes a great way to, whether it's a holder or even a mechanism to help companies be more efficient, that's what we're about and focused on. And we'll keep our eyes on it. I love it.

Just to confirm, you've been holding Bitcoin since 2013. John is our resident like wonder man. Rewind the tape there for a second. All right. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming and doing this. This is absolutely fantastic. everyone go to ramp.com slash pomp go check it out we're uh we're big fans here and i think you guys will enjoy it as well