Why Ramp Wants Customers to Spend Less

Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, interviewed by Joe Lonsdale (American Optimist)

Eric Glyman is co-founder and CEO of Ramp, the corporate card and spend management company, which he describes as a productivity company that happens to move money. Before Ramp he and co-founder Karim Atiyeh started Paribus, an app that found price-drop refunds in your email and was sold to Capital One about a year after launch. Ramp has over 2,000 employees, more than 85,000 customers and a run rate above $2 billion, growing over 100% a year. He grew up in Las Vegas and is in his mid-30s.

Summary

Glyman built Ramp by inverting the incentives he saw at Capital One: a card company that wants customers to spend less, and sells time. Its average customer now cuts expenses by 7% to 12% a year, against an 8% average profit margin, and Ramp tracks how little time users spend in its app. He applies the same logic to AI, where inference spending rose from about $30 billion to about $160 billion in a year and the labs have no reason to send you to the cheaper model, so Ramp built a router that cuts bills by about 40%. Internally he runs small teams that split at 8 to 12 people, measures inputs as well as outputs, and publishes data from his card volume. These signals are from an interview that Joe Lonsdale did with Eric Glyman on American Optimist.

1. Incentives Are Everything. Glyman's first company, Paribus, had a simple value proposition (stores owe you money, so we will get it) and incentives aligned with customers, because it charged a percentage of the refund. Capital One bought it a year after its May 2015 launch and put the team in the credit card division, where he saw teams grow spending, grow margins, promote points and devalue points. When he asked customers what they wanted, many said they just wanted more money in the bank. That led to the idea of a card designed to help people spend less. ▶ 2:03