YouSaid · the spoken record

Kareem Tartia

lines on the record: 117
first: 2025-10-21
most recent: 2025-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Become part of my family in many ways. But the fact that they were willing and able to do this very quickly for someone who was a stranger in retrospect is kind of crazy.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friend Kareem is going to come live in New York with us as soon as the camp is done. And I think his mom couldn't even be in New York around that time. And Zach had something else to do. And the day I met his mom, he was like, welcome me with open arms and everything, told me that she would make sure that I had a great experience staying with them and I show up at their house in the city. And I remember the experience being amazed. I just like opened the door that I had hidden the key for me because they couldn't be there and I opened the door and I go into the kitchen and they're like meals labeled for every day of the week. There's pocket money on the side in case I need it for transportation. Enlist with all the numbers that I could call if I needed any help. I was like, wow, like this is amazing. Don't even know these people and they're already treating me like family. And to this day, I think of Zach and his family as my second family in the US and spend a lot of the holidays together.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that's been most impactful on the rest of my life probably happened early on when I was going through the research science institute at MIT and I was 16 and first time in the US away from my family war breaks out in Lebanon, airports closed and I'd become really close with my best friend today that I had met at that camp Zach who you know quite well were together at research science institute and he just immediately tells me, oh, don't worry about it at all. Camp is ending in a week. You could just come with me and be in New York and my family's amazing. I already told him about you. They're very excited to meet you. This is going to be great. And little did I know that that same day I heard that a couple years later from Zach's mom. I think he called his mom and was like, mom, don't ask any questions.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly in awed talent that we have. I mean, even this past summer, one of our interns, while he was interning at the company, won a cold medal at the International Physics Olympiat. It's just incredible what some of people at RAMP have been able to achieve. So talent, very proud of that.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Caliber of people we've been able to attract and the sum total of not just ramp, but I think the great companies that will come out of ramp and the diaspora of amazing people who have spent some time at ramp and in some cases have decided to go on to start other companies. I mean, I still tell people who join us that I would love for RAMP to be the last job that they ever have to apply for. And that's been very true for a lot of people. And that can mean a lot of things. It can mean that people left and right will just try to approach them because they've been at ramp and it's very easy to want to try to avoid that by hiring people who are purely incredibly loyal and I don't think that's a good idea. I see it as a sign that we're hiring the right people if we keep doing that. So I'm excited to see it as sum total of amazing things that the people who have ever set foot at ramp or worked with us will do over their lifetime.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning from consistently. So I want to put together great teams, solve that challenge and win and more the team that will help us consistently win forever because I would like to build something that hopefully outlives us.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designers, engineers, builders in general, and they always have different answers to questions like, what are you excited about and what you want to do? And like there's some people who really talk about the complexity of the technical challenge and some that talk about the mission itself. And there are like different ways to answer that question. But the one for me that I just continue to go back to is really about the people that I work with. And I feel very lucky that RAMP is such a multifaceted company in some ways where we have to not only be really good at the engineering parts of it, but also the design parts of it and the marketing and the sales and the risk and capital markets and fundraising.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to go into challenges with the assumption that there was a reward at the end and that the reward would feel great. And that was the intent and goal. And I think the more challenges we've gone through and succeeded at conquering or surpassing, the more I realized that the reward is just a journey, to be honest. So it's made me a lot more intentional about doing the things that will help me enjoy the journey over time and enjoy all the challenges that come along the way because the reward for solving challenges is just more complicated challenges over time. So you might as well just put yourself in a position where you are enjoying these challenges as much as possible. And for me in particular, I think that has to do with more than anything else, the people I'm doing it with, I still need a lot of young, very talented.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have myself and focusing a little bit more about how I can maximize the sum total of the output of the team as a whole. And it was very constraining to do that without an arm. I'm like, I'm trying to type as much as I can with my left arm, but I need to be as specific as I can with as few words as possible and drawing diagrams and writing down some concepts. So that was a very funny experience where I had to very quickly figure out how to delegate will.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh god, yeah. There were some funny ones, but the most on the nose one was one of the early days of Paribus, Eric and I were the only two people working on Paribus. And Eric, while having studied a little bit of computer science, wasn't really a software engineer himself. So 100% of the engineering capability of the company was just me. And then I go on a random sking trip one day and due to unfortunate circumstances come back with a broken arm. I remember Eric looking at me and having that reaction. It's like, oh, great. Like we're fucked now. What the hell are we going to do? And luckily, we had started working with a few junior engineers around that time. And that was the first time that I was forced to try to get better at maybe delegating, managing, explaining concepts, explaining architecture, and focusing less on the direct output that I.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. I would also add that there are indirect benefits of the models getting better that we benefit from ourselves as well and the accumulation of more artifacts and data about how customers are using our product every day and for what reasons. This allows us to infer a lot of what their intent is from their actions and the way they decide to fulfill forms and what they approve and not approve. So it's like the more our customers are using the product and deriving positive outcomes, the more we can learn. And as those models get better about reasoning over complex tasks, we benefit from it either. Very exciting place to be in.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before money is moved, after money is moved, and how you optimize these decisions over time, there's this endless cycle and loop between you spend on something, something happens in your business. It's good, great, you do more of it. It's bad. Maybe you should minimize that. So you end up having infinite cycle of making just better decisions with your money and not wasting a lot of time in bureaucracy. So I would love RAM to be as self-driving as possible and for people not to have to log into RAM at all.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be a pretty funny one, but my hope is that people don't have to lug into REMP at all, basically. This is the way to think about it. If you're really obsessed over minimizing the amount of time that things take, and today you're having to log in to ramp and it's taking five seconds and it'll take four and then eventually it'll take zero and you have a lot of your finances that are essentially self-driving. One of the analogies I like is like what's happening with cars you've gone from very mechanical cars where you have to do everything and fix everything and you have things like lane assist and park assist and early signs that the car can assist you and do a little bit more. I think we're getting very close to the waymos like you could just sit in the back and press a button and you go from point A to point B. I think something very similar is happening in many areas of business and the one we're focused on is all the workflows and decisions that happen”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are deciding to optimize the rails and pick different lays based on some different maximization function that's not related to rewards. So in other words, if the decision makers are shifting the path that they take to make the payment might shift. So it is interesting. I mean, stablecoins are certainly very interesting. It's kind of crazy that today payments cannot settle on a weekend or outside of business hours in certain cases. There's no reason why payments shouldn't be settling live 24-7 all the time and be very cheap. So I think that will change. But to be honest, from our perspective at RAMP, we are in the business of optimizing and speeding up the workflows of our customers. And in many ways, like I couldn't care less whether that runs on TACH rails or the card. Or the stable corners.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's still not very clear what it is for consumers or the people paying. Because at the end of the day, if you want to buy something, you just care about the price and how quickly it's going to ship to you and the quality and things like that. Do you really care how you're paying or what is happening behind the scenes? Not really. So in a way, I think a lot of the shifting sense around what is the underlying technology through which money is moving, I'd say that's very irrelevant to the people making payments. But what may become interesting is if you believe in a world where individuals themselves are less involved in making the payments and you have agents doing that on their behalf, it's okay, help me buy that thing. Those agents might not care about rewards as much as you do or may help you make more optimal decisions. You could see a world where”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an interesting one. I think a big misconception is that the reason payments are maybe more expensive than some merchants would like them to be online is because Visa takes such a bit cut. That's not true at all. One of the reasons that maybe card payments might be a little bit more expensive for merchants in the US is a lot of that expense comes in the form of rewards for consumers and American consumers are very, very attached to their rewards. It's going to be interesting to see in what areas people are willing to give up any of their rewards in order to, I don't know, maybe get a differentiated experience in some way and the merchants get cheaper payments. But the stablecoin promise as it stands today for merchants is one where payments are maybe faster and cheaper.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You end up rewarding and punishing people who make the right estimates, so you incentivize estimates that are longer than they should take so that they can hit those estimates. So it's a very simple tactical thing that you could do. But it's hard because you need the natural ability to understand how quickly it is to actually develop things. And it's hard to do that without expertise in the thing that you're building. It's hard for non-engineers to know how long an engineering task can take if you're really good at it. It's hard for designers to know how long a design task should take, et cetera. So not following a lot of the processes that other companies follow, because very often process gets in the way. I think process are a good way to move you to average in a discipline if you feel like you're below average. But often some of the people who are most extreme on how fast I move or on any dimension that you're trying to measure tend to do things in a very odd, non-”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think things will take. And he's trying to introduce that. And I get freaked out. He's like, why are you doing this, Jeff? He's like, well, because so that we can know how fast we're actually moving. I was like, wait, you don't think we're moving fast enough? He's like, no, I think we're moving incredibly fast, like faster than any place I've seen. But I just want to measure it. And I believe that there's a little bit of a Schrodinger's principle there where it's like you can get a lot of precision on how long things take or you could do them very fast. It's hard to get both because if you start to put a lot of importance on measuring in advance how long you think things will take and”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you want to shorten the cycle as much as possible between idea and putting the thing in front of a customer. And there's just so many ways to do that. You could simply just focus on, great, I'm writing code. How long does it take to get to production? And then there's like, well, how fast do your test run? How quickly can you actually deploy a story on that, which is quite funny. It's like the first time we hired a product manager at RAMP was Jeff. He's like, he came into the organization, he had some experience being a PM at another organization. And he looks at the way we are prioritizing work and cutting up chunks of work. And he's a little bit appalled that we are not sizing the different levels of effort for the different tasks. There are 10 things we want to do. Like this one is five points and we'll take five hours and this one is one point and we'll take one hour and whatever. And it's like freaking out that we're not really measuring how long we”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two, how far have you been able to take that thing? I'm a lot more interested in essentially assembling the Avengers at the company where everyone has a clear superpower than a lot of people who just check the box on 10 things. The more things you are looking to vet someone on, the more likely you are to get average people, essentially.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people to work with. But that pattern certainly extended to a lot of the ways we've done recruiting early on. When I look at someone's resume, I don't have a checklist of 10 things I'm trying to check the box on. I'm generally looking for what they're telling me in their resume they're really good at brushing up on that topic if this is a topic that I'm not an expert on and interviewing them specifically on that one topic. You're telling me you're great at something I'm going to see how great you actually are and you better be a lot more knowledgeable about it than me after doing a couple hours of research. And I get two very strong signals from this is like, well, how good of a judge are you and how good you are at that actual thing? Okay, you're saying you're great at poker, for example, or you're great poker player. It's like, how good you actually are? Are you good judge of yourself? Are you aware of the spectrum of talent in that field?”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the people we hired very early on at RAMP was Kevin Lee, who had interned with us at Parabus in January for one month, like not a lot of companies offer one month internships, had less than one year in college, but clearly even then looked incredibly spiky. He had left high school early to prepare for the informatics Olympiad. He ended up finishing college in two and a half years. And we met Calvin very early on and built a very strong relationship. So by the time that he was graduating, we were actually starting ramp and he was one of our very first hires. And to this day, Calvin, I think, has his hands in so many different things that Ramp and has gone from being an engineer to being on the sales team for a bit to running our forward deployed engineering organization. And while he's incredibly spiky, turned out to be also very versatile in the company.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knew about a lot of the hardest classes that students were taking. So we could go and look at, let's say, freshmen in college and the classes they're taking and the level of extreme talent in one area and recognize that very quickly. So it was less about like what is your total GPA and your total sum of experiences and other interviews you've done throughout your four years in college. But I know that in year one of school, if you're taking that class and got a really good grade in that one class, it must mean that you are extremely talented at math or computer science, whatever it is. So we're looking for these spikes like very, very least. So a couple of ways that we're looking for extremes. We're looking for freshmen, other companies we're trying to hire juniors. We're looking”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love this framework of hiring for slope and for spikiness as opposed to, let's say, people who check the box on 10 different things. And we've applied that since very, very early, even at Paribus. Like I remember one of the early things that Paribus was like, well, we're a small company with very limited resources competing for talent with the Facebooks and Googles of the world. It's like we can pay them less money. We have less of a brand. We have, in many ways, less large scale problems to work on. It's like, how do we really differentiate? And there were a couple of things. One is I'm going to look for very spiky people in areas where I have asymmetric information. We were recent college graduates in some way we knew a lot about the people who had gone to the school that we had gone to or the schools that we had experience with. So namely, I guess Harvard and MIT for Eric and I. And not only that,”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is what Brand is. Ultimately, when you think about what brand is like, well, if you're watching a movie and you see a red can in the distance, you might not be able to read Coca-Cola, but you know it's a Coca-Cola can. That's very, very powerful. So I think one way to grab attention is to seek differentiation and with enough repetition, eventually you're like, well, okay, I see the pattern here”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's no one in yellow. The only thing in yellow was Snapchat. Consumer Company Snapchat. And the primary reason why we chose the yellow was because it was different. That's it. And you could have argued at the time, and certainly some people did that, oh, well, if you go yellow, you're not going to get anyone's trust and you want to start with things that they associate. It was like, no, like we are going to change that. We're going to be different. And if we do that really well, it's going to pay dividends for a very long time. And I think it does. You see very yellow ads or something like that. It's a single app. You assume it's ramp.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny, I was re listening to one of Senra's episodes on Dyson recently. I actually found a lot of the same principles we try to apply for this in the way that Dyson ran his business, which is seeking differentiation for differentiation's sake. We are always looking for ways to be different. And the very first way in which we've done that really well, a lot of credit goes to Diego and our team who runs the design team and how they think about design. In the very early days, we were thinking about what the right color for RAM should be. And we're working with brand partners on it. And I remember this color wheel that you look at. And you see all these companies that we aspire to be like and where they are on the color wheel and all the finance related apps or somewhere in the blue or green. So green for money, blue is trust.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video because you look at that image, it's like, what are these people doing dressed in banana costumes? And you're holding signs with text on them so you can actually tell what's happening without having to listen because you can read. And that ad became very effective. And it worked very, very well for three or four months and then it stopped working. And that is very true in online advertising. It's moving so quickly and the platforms that you're doing ads on top of are changing so quickly. So like being at the forefront of what's happening and how you can get alpha is super important. So we want to hire people who are obsessed, aware of the changes happening with those systems, et cetera. That's also true in SEO, right? Like Google every once in a while will publish articles about how they're changing the way that they prioritize SEO to say, for example, reward websites that load incredibly fast or reward websites that are very mobile friendly. And they do that every couple of months. So being aware of what's happening and moving very quickly is super important.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Facebook introduced video ads into newsfeed, I think in 2014 or 15, that was a new thing at that time. When they first introduced it, used to scroll through in NewsFeed and the videos would just play immediately with the sound. And people were really annoyed and I guess bothered. And Facebook then decided to make those video ads not play the sound by default. And when that happened, the effectiveness of video ads on Facebook dropped drastically. So they got cheaper as a result. But the videos that became really effective were the ones where you could tell what was happening essentially without the sound. So one of our most effective video ads at Paribus, we ran like very early when that was starting to happen, when Facebook had made that change, where Eric and I were dressed in banana costumes holding signs with text on them. It's a great silence.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are things that have always been true, let's say in pay to marketing or what happens in social media. It's like you get a lot of these concepts and patterns that work incredibly effectively in paid advertising for a very short period of time and stop working. So it's very important to like always be at the forefront of what is happening there and why it's working until all the alpha starts being taken away and it stops working. And I'll give you actually an example from the Paribus days because I don't want to give away all our secret sauce either because I think that was like a very powerful one.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you want to generate an image for that article, we have a tool that was built internally that allows you to generate an image that is on brand within seconds. So it's quick experimentation, accountability with the person coming up with the creative and tools that don't get in the way but allow you to get your work very quickly with as little dependency as possible.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More about principles, it's fast iteration cycles, it's scientific, where there's experimentation and feedback loop, it's led the person who came up with the, let's say, creative idea be accountable to that idea. It's not done by committee. You don't get to ask 10 people what they think and come up with a watered-down idea. You just do it. And if you do it well, you get credit for it. If you don't do it well enough times, eventually you will no longer be at the company that needs to be known. People have more skin in the game when they're making those decisions and making sure that the tools that that team has access to are not getting in the way but are empowering you. We make a lot more use of AI tooling now in marketing than we used to. And today, if you want to put together an article on RAMP and you are, let's say, on the SEO team or on the content marketing team,”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can either figure out what the exact value is, or you could think about it comparatively. So the way we've thought about it in working with you, which has been amazing versus, let's say, working with another random podcast, is I listen to your podcast a lot. I love it. I think a lot of people like me listen to your podcast. I think a lot of our audience is people like me who are building businesses and obsessing over businesses. If we decided that we wanted to work with podcasters, who are the best in the world that we can work with that have the right audience for us. And that's the lens. It's more about targeting the right audience than it is, let's say, a higher level metric like how many clicks am I getting or how many views am I getting? It's about getting the right views. And that's the way to think about it for us.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changes seven times in a week, and that's $107,000, or you can have two static billboards for $200,000. I would argue that one billboard changing seven times in a week is a much more powerful way to drive a message and get a story out than two billboards. And it's a lot cheaper. So a lot of the attitude that we brought in is like, how can we find these hacks and ways to get more out of the systems that exist? The creative is not really changing. I'm not trying to influence that, but like the system through which we are doing marketing work is a lot more inquisitive and experimentation driven.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we do that, we can take a lot more shots on goal. We could take a lot more risk with the things that we do because we know that if it doesn't work out, we could try something else tomorrow. And that's really the type of attitude that we went into it with. And I think that's helped us a ton. I actually have another example that I love. You could think about billboard advertising. If you want to put a billboard in New York, let's say it costs you $100,000. Funny thing with billboards is you don't really get that much economy of scale. If you want to put another billboard, it costs you $200,000. If you want to put three billboards at $300,000. But if you want to change a billboard that you've already bought, it only costs you $1,000. So that means that if you have one billboard in Union Square and you want to change it tomorrow, that cost you another thousand dollars. You want to change it after tomorrow, that's another thousand dollars. So you can essentially have a billboard in unions.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just kind of crazy. What if you need to work on something that I don't know should take 10 minutes or 20 minutes? It doesn't matter. It'll take two weeks for it to be in front of somebody and then they'll do the work for 10 minutes. And with that kind of clock speed, it's impossible to get anything done. And while a lot of people would have gone into marketing were like, okay, great, the way to fix this is let's come up with a better campaign idea. I went into it with, let's just like look at the actual system that generates work and focus on how we can make that system as efficient as possible. I didn't go into it with like, oh, I have better creative ideas than the people on those teams because we have amazing people. I just want to put their ideas in front of the world as quickly and as efficiently as possible. That's what I'm focused on. We have great creative people. They'll still come up with the ideas, but when they have an idea and I want to put it in front of someone, I want it to take 10 minutes, not two weeks.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in many ways, like applied to Elon algorithm to it. So in a lot of parts of marketing, you need to work with the brand team to generate an image or an asset, whether it's for a product launch or an ad it's like you want an image, an asset, some copy. And you, as part of marketing, you tend to work with the brand team on those. It's like the way it used to run before is for every single piece of content that you wanted to generate you had to write a brief. You would write a brief to explain to the brand team what you're trying to do. That brief would get reviewed by the brand team about once a week. The brand team would decide who to assign to it based on skill set, and then you would get some output two weeks later, or maybe a week later. So that meant that no matter what you wanted to do in marketing, if you're working with a brand team, it would at the very least take about two weeks.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's say we would try to run an ad on a podcast or partner up with a podcast and it doesn't work. We're like, well, podcasting doesn't work for us. My attitude would be, it's like, no, you picked the wrong person to partner with, or you picked the wrong format of an ad. Why is the thing broken? It's not that the thing doesn't work. It's you haven't figured out how to make it work. It's like clearly all these forms of advertising do work. Otherwise, other good companies wouldn't be doing it. We just need to figure out what works for us and how to make it work for us. That was the lens that we brought to really everything, direct mail, paid advertising, brand advertising, all the different things in marketing, product marketing and how we launch products. So I went into it with the attitude of we're going to fix the experimentation mechanism and the system through which we do work.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An upward limit to them, and if we didn't figure out how to reaccelerate our ability to generate leads, we would be in trouble today. That was a year, year and a half ago. And I started obsessing over that problem, and I guess I turn to some sense of paranoia when everyone else around me feels like things are going great. It's like, okay, why does the problem? And for me, at a time, that was the problem. How do we make that better? Around that time, there was maybe an attitude in marketing broadly of we would try things and if they didn't work, we would maybe assume that I was like, well, those things don't really work for us as opposed to no, they have to work. We just haven't figured out how to make them work.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're like, okay, conversion is getting really good. We've got them better at monetization, but conversion can't get better than 100% or some kind of upward limit. There's some kind of upward limit to monetization as well, some percentage of the value that we're driving upward limit or the upward limit to how big our TAM is, is a lot further because we're still to this day sub 2% of corporate card alone. And it just felt like we were starting to slow down maybe a little bit in our ability to generate leads while...”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. The funny thing about that is I think that was a time where all the lagging indicators were going extremely well. Like a lot of people were asking me at the time, it's like, what do you think is broken? I mean, things seem to be going quite well. There's no need for a change there. And I was looking at the early leading indicators and starting to see things like, well, we've made our conversion really good in a lot of segments. We were converting at more than 50%. That meant that if a customer had a conversation with a salesperson, there was a 50 plus percent chance that they will be a customer within 30 to 60 days, which is incredible.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“joke now that I'm a better doctor than I've ever been, but I'm not a doctor. I'm a better lawyer than I've ever been, but I'm not a lawyer. And in practice, that means that when I'm having conversation with my doctor, I'm a lot more knowledgeable and I know to ask the right questions. When I'm having conversations with a lawyer, they're a lot more efficient and I'm asking the right questions. And as a result, I think like engineers that know what is possible can help us build the future of our product much better for our customers, even though they have not done procurement before. They have not done AP before. They have not done accounting before, et cetera.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what it's capable of doing and what is possible, and these tend to be more technical people in general. I think the technical folks are more likely to see the possibilities in terms of product than non-technical folks. So as a result, particularly right now technical folks can be very impactful in other disciplines because they see the possibilities better than other experts might. And the other side of it is the gap between not having subject matter expertise in a domain. I can say in marketing or healthcare or education and having it is the smallest it's ever been. The only thing stopping you from getting that knowledge is your ability to learn and to ask the right questions of an LLM that can help you become an expert a lot quicker than you would otherwise be. I like to”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we're at an interesting junction right now and the best analogy that I can give is the Ford one, where like if you had asked people before cars what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. We're probably at the juncture right now where you ask customers what they want from your products and they'll say like, oh, I want an initial widget here, an additional button there. They don't realize that the car to their faster horse is possible. We as a company should be obsessing over what do customers really want? Well, they want to get from point A to point B and what is the best way to get them there. It's like, well, to build a car for them. And if you ask questions, like, who even realizes that that car is something that is possible and what it might look like? It's like, well, the people who came up with the technology for how an engine function.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to charge for complexity of the task that the agent's been able to solve and you're starting to see more and more business models where you're essentially charging for the time that the agent is spending on a task or the number of tokens that they're using, which is fine. I worry a little bit about that model sometimes incentivizing the engineering team to not be as efficient as possible with their use of AI if you're a company charging for how much time the agent is spending on the task. Are you not incentivized to just use lots of CPU cycles and not make it super efficient? So I worry about that a lot. That's why I don't really love that model. I'm not quite sure exactly how it's going to look like.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For customers and captural value through software pricing and software revenue. And in many ways, I mean, we're still trying to figure out the right way to monetize and price for some of the agents that we're working on and building that drive more value. I think a lot of companies are really trying to figure out how do you charge for work? Like how do you price for work?”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guide us better towards the right things to do. You get feedback signal from the market that they are willing to pay for certain products because they get value from them. And that's when we decided to transition. There was a lot of fear when we did, I'd say, internally, because you have this like beautiful business model that's working really well and everyone's a little freaked out. Are people going to be willing to pay for it? Is it going to hurt our conversion? Is it going to hurt our growth? And it turns out that not only did it not do that, in many ways it accelerated that growth because it's incentivized our sales team to mention those products, talk about them, and it incentivized our customers to be a lot more demanding and responsive. And as a result, they helped us essentially guide our roadmap a lot better than if product was free and no one cared about it. A lot of our focus on our engineering teams right now is on continuing to build these products that drive value.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really think about what a real skill is at ramp is like we're really good at, let's say, reducing the bureaucracy, complexity, time waste in a system, a company in building software to do that. And that has a lot of value for really large businesses. So what this means is our mechanism for capturing value, which is a small percentage of car transaction, breaks for large businesses because we drive a lot of value for them. We built a lot of great software for them, but we're not able to capture any of that value for really, really large businesses because our revenue mechanism is not scaling. So that's when we started thinking about, okay, great, what is the right value capture mechanism when most of our product and engineering teams are focused on driving value for these complex businesses? And you're like, well, we need to be able to charge for software. And frankly, if we are charging for software, we'll...”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saving money, the best ways to help them save money is to help them not make transactions that they should have never made as opposed to giving them points and rewards. And that's a beautiful model. The limits of that model, though, is that the amount of money that businesses spend on card does not scale linearly with the complexity of that business. So small businesses tend to run everything through CARD. So it works well for small businesses. But as you mature, the larger businesses tend to move a lot more of their purchasing and spending through essentially bill payments and procurement systems and not as much through cards. So if you try to visualize what does card spend look in a business as”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we were saying earlier, it's a beautiful and very simple business model to be able to just put the cards in the hands of somebody, the more they use it, the more revenue you get. And you're just essentially focused on building great software so that they're incentivized to use it. We actually want businesses to spend less. Unlike most other card companies, we're not here to put rewards in front of them that will incentivize them to spend more. Our view is build software that helps them spend less and as a result they'll use your card and you get more share of wallet.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source