Jacob Soderstjerna

Squire at @tryRamp

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

Today, Ramp raised $750M at a $44B valuation.

Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20th the size.

For 2000 years, business was built on two pillars. Today, a third: intelligence.

It’s your least governed cost. It’s also your single greatest opportunity.

[Diego Zaks @diegozaks]

Building and launching this product took hundreds of hours of research, co-building with customers, and renting a robot arm.

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

Introducing Stack.

The AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring. Learns your firm's process, runs the close, posts the journals. Fully auditable.

We’re living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet.

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

Meet Brian.

Brian’s been carrying accounting on his back for a long time.

Super Bowl Sunday, he finally gets backup.

[Ramp @tryramp]

Brian's First Day As CFO - Live From NYC https://t.co/NUaxAEu3id

[Karim Atiyeh @karimatiyeh]

“Build faster.” Yep, that about sums it up. We want @tryramp engineers to be as productive as possible, firing on all cylinders. Jolt is pushing us even further in that direction. High. Speed. Development. Velocity. That's the move here. Welcome Jolt team! ⚡️
https://t.co/tNuixHPJfk

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Nine years ago, I launched Founders (@FoundersPodcast).

Today, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra.

The first episode goes live this Sunday. Subscribe wherever you watch or listen to podcasts.

Founders will still come out every week.

@scicomm // @hubermanlab

[FORTUNE @FortuneMagazine]

Cofounders @eglyman and @karimatiyeh launched @tryramp to build a more efficient generation of corporate cards.

The six-year-old startup just broke $1 billion in annualized revenue in August, and it now claims more than 45,000 businesses as customers. https://t.co/PRomrsNEP9

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Exclusive: Ramp, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate corporate finance tasks, says it has raised $500 million in a funding round that values the company at $22.5 billion https://t.co/NjLsNaTOLO

[Karim Atiyeh @karimatiyeh]

Finance teams waste hours chasing receipts and answering weird policy questions. Now they don’t have to.

Introducing our first @tryramp AI agents. Upload your company policy and put the bullshit work on autopilot so your finance team can actually do finance.

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

I first met Calvin in 2016.

Karim and I had just launched Paribus. We weren’t a big company. Our office was my kitchen table.

So when an email from a 17-year-old high school dropout landed in my inbox asking for an internship, I skimmed by it. Thankfully, Karim didn’t!

- Admitted into MIT at age 16
- Code running on the International Space Station
- Top 20 in the country in the Putnam Math Competition

Calvin arrived on his first day in a T-shirt he wore representing the United States in a programming competition. Three weeks later he’d built an AI model to automate refund decisions. This was years before people knew what AI even was.

Fast forward four years. Karim and I start Ramp. Our first phone call? Persuading Calvin to join as a founding engineer.

The challenge: make filing an expense as easy as taking a photo of a receipt!
Fortunately, Calvin looks at hard problems the way a dog looks at a bone.

I watched him come back to the office every night, just as I was leaving, Wendy’s in hand, no small talk, working because he wanted to, only pausing to watch The Yankees’ playoff run.

Eighty thousand expenses a day are now submitted using the code he wrote. Each one takes just 15 seconds, not 15 minutes. That’s 20,000 hours of work saved every day!

Why am I telling this story?

I think founders get too much credit. The single most important thing we do is hire people smarter than us.

Phil Knight had Jeff Johnson, who drove to track meets across the Pacific Northwest and sold the first 3,250 pairs of Nike’s from the boot of his car. That’s why you’re wearing Nikes.

Steve Jobs had Ken Kocienda, who mapped thousands of thumb taps to solve the seemingly impossible problem of touch-typing on glass. That’s why you have an iPhone in your pocket.

Calvin is one of those people.

Who wouldn’t want him to file your expenses?

[Ramp @tryramp]

Our engineers have been building AI tools like CRAZY the past month — already saving the whole team hundreds of manual hours.

Our mission is to save businesses time & money. That drive for efficiency starts with our culture.

Here are some highlights 🧵

[Ramp @tryramp]

EXCLUSIVE: A car was found smashed by a giant yellow wrecking ball in Chinatown, NYC.

Foul play? Or elaborate marketing stunt to inform businesses they can earn more on their operating cash?

Our team investigates.

________________________________

Ramp Business Corporation is a financial technology company and is not a bank. All bank services provided by First Internet Bank of Indiana, Member FDIC.

[John Sarihan @jsarihan]

📣 Huge update — I’ve started a new company!

After 4 years at Ramp, I’ve started something new (and we're hiring). The past few years were incredible - being a part of the rocket ship on a ~15 person engineering team to an 1000+ person org, and growing from 100s of customers to 25,000+. The talent, ambition, and teamwork I experienced have set the bar for what greatness looks like—I’m excited to keep that standard into building this new team.

Much more to come on the new company soon — but here’s a preview: Ryan Daniels + I already working with our first partners, saving our customers millions of dollars in legal costs, and there’s a ton of demand to keep up with.
Long term: we’re tackling a massive vertical opportunity worth over $200B, leveraging AI to make a real impact.

We’re growing the early engineering team. If you’re passionate about transforming legal with AI, I’d love to connect! Referrals welcome too!

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

"The team you build is the company you build." @rabois and @bchesky are two of the best in the world at hiring. @tryramp, while much younger, is NYC's fastest growing startup in history and one of its most talent dense companies.

If you're free on October 17, we hope you'll join us for https://t.co/tCPoxDfF7m. @karimatiyeh and I will share Ramp's playbook on how we source, onboard and try to create the conditions for people to do their lives’ work

[Ramp @tryramp]

We're absolutely *thrilled* to share that Ramp made #2 on this year's @LinkedIn Top Startups List!

To celebrate, our VP of People @jacobwallenberg asked employees what they like most about working at Ramp.

If you like what you hear, we have 64 open roles: https://t.co/YP6qYxZ6FH

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

David Senra (@FoundersPodcast) has read 365+ books on history's greatest entrepreneurs.

Last night he got to share some of the best lessons he's learned with @patrick_oshag.

Here are 17 key insights from their conversation:

1) The best investors aren’t investors, they’re entrepreneurs who never sold.

2) After reading hundreds of books on history's greatest entrepreneurs the one word to describe them all is FOCUSED.

3) Spend more time studying commodity businesses. Since they don't have a product advantage, they have to find other areas that will give them a competitive advantage.

4) Having remarkable customer service is a competitive advantage. Don’t just have reactive customer service, have proactive customer service.

5) You don’t have to buy your competitors, you just need to outlast them.

6) Build a business that is authentic and natural to you.

7) You can make a living doing a business you don't like, but you can only build a world-class business if you're obsessed with it.

David refers to this Charlie Munger quote:

"Another thing that I found is an intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t be really good in anything where I didn’t have an intense interest."

7) If you don't change your behavior after reading a book or listening to a podcast, you learned nothing.

8) Go for freedom. Don't trade freedom for money or prestige.

9) If you're free, you'll work on things you enjoy. If you work on things you enjoy, you'll get good at it. If you get good at it, you'll make a lot of money from it.

10) Entrepreneurship is a miracle. It allows anyone to go from dirt poor to a multi-billionaire.

11) Reading is a miracle. You can pick up a book and learn everything about a person in just a few hours.

12) You don’t have to be a genius to be successful. What you do need is a ton of effort.

13) If you can't outsmart them, outwork them.

14) You know you found your life's calling when someone couldn't pay you to stop doing it.

15) The reward for great work is more work. That's why it's so important to pick something you love doing. That's why all of the greatest entrepreneurs worked until their death–they loved their business.

16) The best entrepreneurs in the world all spend time reading books about the best entrepreneurs that came before them.

17) Wisdom is prevention. Wise people don’t solve problems they prevent them.

- - -
Thanks to @tryramp for hosting the event.

If you were at the event, share your biggest takeaway below!

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

I’m doing a LIVE podcast in New York next Monday with @patrick_oshag !

It’s FREE to attend because of the great people at @tryramp

But space is limited so register below!

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

Announcement!

Special Mid-Week Series of CFO Secrets - AI for CFOs

What does AI mean for CFOs and their functions? I get asked this a lot.

I never answer it. Why?

I have absolutely no idea what it means.

And I don’t mean that in a “hey no-one knows” kind of way.

I mean it in a “I’m a luddite and I’m worried AI is going to eat my children” kind of way.

But it’s time to get off the pot. I gotta understand this thing.

So I’m running a special series of the newsletter (in addition to the normal Saturday post) each week for the next 4 weeks. Diving deep into what AI means for CFOs for the next 5 years.

But I can’t do this on my own - I’m going to need some friends to help…

Each week I’m releasing an interview with some of the best leaders at the frontier of AI in finance.

The guests are incredible … and I can’t wait to share them with you.

The first interview is with Eric Glyman - founder of AI powered corporate spend platform Ramp.

If you missed it in your inbox the link is below:

[Ramp @tryramp]

5 years and over 25,000 businesses running on Ramp. 🚀

Today we’re celebrating the incredible companies of all shapes and sizes who do more on Ramp.

Together, we’ve saved them over $1 billion and over $10 million hours.

Here are just a few of their stories 🧵