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

“That land and expand motion really started to become real, I would say, like two and a half or three years into the company, where it was no longer this cool looking card with a nice UX that integrated it with your receipts. But we actually were building a P automation software, accounting automation software, et cetera. How do you think about it?”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of their software in house, healthy skepticism of external vendors. While they weren't going to build their card product, but as a result, their perspective when they wanted to use ramp was like, we're really only interested in the card. All the other software we want to build ourselves. It's like, great. We're excited that we offered an API because they're like fantastic. We can plug into the card that you've built and we can map it to our internal ERP and extract all the data we need and we'll build all the software. first six months roll around is like, oh, we really like what you built there over the past couple months. We want to try it. And they tried that. It's like, oh, we really like what you've built around API automation. We really want to try it. And before you know it, they're actually trying more and more of the product, driving a lot more value, and they're very excited to roll it out, not only to more users in their business, but frankly to more of the finance workflows that they're experiencing.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out what accounting category does a transaction fall into? And we kept essentially mapping out the total amount of time wasted in all parts of finance team that we touched. And we looked at that as like the total addressable market. And as we build products to get more adoptions, you get more customers excited to use more of RAM and the total value that we deliver for them is higher. I would say there were points early on where you get customers that just don't want to hear the pitch at all. They're like, I'm really only interested in the card part. I'm really only interested in cashback I'm going to get and maybe the API that you offer. I remember the one early customer that I'm sure you're familiar with that sadly cannot mention in just broadly in aerospace engineering. Famous for wanting to build everything in-house.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it really, once we got in, then the algorithm became, let's try to get our best estimate on how much total time is being wasted by customers and get that time down as much as possible. So we think a lot about the value that we create for customers in terms of minimizing time waste. So you look at time and money wasted. Money wasted on transactions that shouldn't have happened, time wasted on reviewing transactions or adding information related to transactions so that they can be reviewed. And you get the sum total of that time and you start building products that minimize the time spent. Can you predict what that transaction was for instead of asking the user for a memo? Can you get price benchmarks about what products cost so that person doing procurement doesn't have to go spend a lot of time doing research? Can you extract the information from an invoice that was received and account for it properly so that”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot more as create this, just discover what the price really is and where the market really is. So we could set a checkpoint and start building from that checkpoint, which in retrospect, yeah, it was a hard round to get aligned on the need to raise. But at the end of the day, we also saw it as, look, at the end of the day, if we get great people on board and great investors on board who are excited about the journey ahead is like, who really cares where the checkpoint is? We're never really trying to maximize what the valuation is at every single round. That doesn't really matter. It's about what the ultimate enterprise value that we can create is. And I think that just comes from the sum total of value we're creating for our customers.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down, but that's so much dead, but more of a why the hell would be raise because we don't really need the cash and evaluations are done. So what the hell is the point of that? It's hard to say. Part of me thinks that, yeah, I was wrong and part of me was like, we'll never know. But the reason it was so interesting is because when things like that happen, especially in the private markets, a lot of external observers might have the perception of, well, the last mark that that company had was at a time where valuations were not really anchored in reality. So what really is the mark today? No one really knows. So it ends up creating that uncertainty for investors, for employees, for everybody. And there's an element of, hey, the valuation is what it is. Who cares? Like the act of raising around only just makes it known. It doesn't change anything about the valuation. It's just like a price discovery mechanism. So that round, I think of”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say. Might have been 2022. You had a little bit of a down market that started in maybe Jen or February of 2021, if I'm getting my dates right. 22 is the bad. 22 was the bad year, right? So it was end of 2021, might have been the peak, and 22 was the bad year. So that round was somewhere towards the end of 22 or 23 or something like that. Not because it was hard to raise the round. It was more because it was hard for me to make peace with the fact that the valuations had gone.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. A lot. I realized that we were very lucky to be in a position where almost every round there was a lot more demand from investors than there was supply. But I see it as a great opportunity to make sure that a lot of investors that we're excited about can often get maybe a starting position in ramp and build up the position that they're really excited to get over time. And we make that very obvious. We go into the relationship one step at a time and a lot of investors get some allocation in one round. And as we build a relationship and they get more excited about the business, we get more excited about working with them. They have an opportunity to invest in subsequent rounds. And there's been a dynamic that really has started at our seed round and still hasn't ended. Most of our investors have, maybe all of them, have participated in multiple rounds.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be great partners to us, et cetera. So we've always thought about it very similarly that we think about interviewing great employees. So in the same way that think of employees, you could bring the best person into the company, but if you don't spend time with them to onboard them and figure out what you exactly want them to do and what their skill set is and empower them to do the best work that they can, if you bring investors on board and not nurture that relationship and actually get to know them better and understand what they're really good at and how they can help you, you're not going to get a lot out of it. So we do spend a lot of time obsessing over how to keep our investors aware of the business, how it's going, what challenges we're facing, and how they're best positioned to help us. We spend a lot of time educating them about the business and its challenges. And I think it's a lot more powerful to do that over a long period of time so that they see.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The framework that I have for it is we don't think of investors very differently than we think of our employees. The difference is you can't buy ramp stock on the open market. You can be a private investor in ramp or you can come work at ramp. And these are the two ways that you are able to get ramp equity. Employees investor time and their effort and investors investor capital or their piece capital. They're not that different. And in the same way that we like to select for employees who we think brings something to the table and can help us differentiate and push the envelope further. That's how we think about investors as well. It's like, what do we think of it as a long-term partnership? And we think about what they can bring to the table as well. And it's very different for every investor. Some investors have expertise that they can help us with and a lot of them have networks and great portfolio companies that we think can”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or notice, but remember telling Dahlian's, I think I'm going to stop playing Fortnite. I need to start getting serious because Eric and I are starting another company. And he got very curious and he tells me that he and Keith had just started, I think, at Founders Fund, and they were essentially looking to fund an idea just like this one. And I think he tells me something along those, oh, I'm going to be in San Francisco next week. Why don't you come and pitch us on ramp? I then call Eric is like, what do you think should we do this? Like, we don't really need the investment. And both got really excited, particularly because Keith himself was a legendary investor and had had a legendary run and was particularly knowledgeable about that space. He had helped start Square, was early at PayPal. He was uniquely positioned to understand exactly what we were trying to do. And we felt like he would be the perfect investor for our kind of business. We're interested to talk to him more.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some capital set aside and building a business like ramp required capital because you need to fund the receivables of your customers. We're like, great, we have more capital than we did as first-time founders. We have more credibility. We don't really need investors. The first investor that we got connected with was because around that time I was playing Fortnite with my brother and some of his friends and turns out that there were a lot of other founders and people in the startup ecosystem that we were playing with. And one of them was Deleon Asparohov at Founders Fund. He was pretty sure on some sort of garden leaf because he had left Koslaw with Keith Ruboy and was about to join Founders Fund. And I was still at Capital One, still thinking about ramp exactly how it was going to look like and when we were going to leave Capital One to start the company. And I remember telling Delian, I was like, oh, I think we had put in.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merchant acceptor identifier into a human readable text. You often look at these credit card statements like, what is that thing? It makes no sense. What is MCDX? It's like, oh, that's a McDonald's identifier. Okay, good. Why don't we just call that thing McDonald's? So we built the tech to clean up the merchant names. We built the tech to map the receipts in your inbox to receipts in your statement that we just kept improving the product one step at a time and taking it further and further and further. But that was the very first version of Ramp. It's just like really good mapping of receipts. In terms of how we thought about investors, Eric and I did not really want to raise at the beginning. Part of the reason we wanted to start ramp as well was it's one of those things that we could do because we had the right to do because we were second time founder.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first differentiation we really built and we pulled from some of the skill set we had acquired at Paribus was a very robust integration with your email. You make card transactions. A lot of the receipts go to your email. How do we tie these two things together as effectively as possible? And we are really, really good at parsing emails while preserving the privacy of your business emails. Build some tech that would identify the emails that are very likely to be receipts, extracting those, identifying purchases and tying them to your car transaction. And that step alone actually saves a lot of time from the workflow of submitting expenses. You look at your statement as like, oh man, where's the receipt for debt thing? And we got very, very good at mapping receipts in your inbox to the transaction. The next step is we got very, very good at essentially transforming the”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product over time. So these were people that we had gone through Y Combinator with in 2015 with Paribus. These were my brother who was also starting his company. A lot of our friends who were entrepreneurs in New York and the startup ecosystem in New York. Those were our early customers. They were partners more than they were customers, frankly. They were design partners.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you. They still have a really good brand, but at the time, that's all they had. They have a good brand. And yeah, I guess you could log in and check your statement, but that's about it. Funnily enough, our pitch in the early days before we had officially launched, as we were looking for design partners and people to give us feedback on the product, it wasn't like this is amazing and going to change your life. It was this is not worse dynamics. And you might as well give it a try. So it was like, it's a card, it works, it does all the things, the Amex card or any other business card will do. And because we have built maybe the direct trust with you, you better trust that we will make it better for you over time. What a pitch. It was a terrible pitch. But we went and essentially sold this to friends and family, people who trusted us not because of the product we had built, but just because of their belief in our capability to improve the”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sense of where they are wasting both time and money and how you can help them save as much VIT as possible. And this is still true to this day about ramp. I'd say the biggest difference is the scope of our ambition has gotten a lot bigger. We're not only helping businesses with the money and the time they spend on, let's say, like card purchases, but it's really all the spend that is happening across their business and all the workflow associated with it, starting with procurement, right, which you could describe as the workflows that dictate how a business makes decisions on what to buy and how to buy it, how to negotiate for it, et cetera, all the way to accounting for those transactions and reporting on it. So the scope of our ambition has gone from the mode of transaction, the card, to all the workflows happening before all the workflows happening after and all the time waste.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly not done with our entrepreneurial journey. We wanted a bigger challenge. And a lot of the idea for ramp early on was what if we developed something like Pair Best for Businesses? Specifically, what if we built technology to help businesses save as much money as possible? And that later turned into how can we build technology that helps businesses save as much time and money as possible because businesses, as we both know, tend to waste a lot more time than they do money. Those are generally interchangeable. So we set out to build ramp. And just like it was the case for Paribus, really the card early on was a way to know what businesses we're spending time and money on. If you know what tools they use and how much money they're spending on them, you get a sense of how the business functions, what kind of business they are, and you eventually get”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More revenue you make. So we start understanding that fascinating business model, and it felt very powerful to at Capital One combine that card with the Paribus offering. So it just felt like a great natural fit. Two years into our journey, so after spending about two years at Capital One and growing the Paribus product, which is now called Capital One Shopping and includes some other features that I think are very valuable. We started thinking what's next for us, like both Eric and I were.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Capital One team, they wanted to give us the capital to support the funding to essentially turn the antagonistic relationships with the retailers into more friendly relationships. And they had a lot of great relationships with those retailers. So that was very interesting. But the most interesting part about those acquisition conversations is we got to learn a lot more about the credit card industry, how it worked, where the revenue came from. And it was fascinating to see that product that you essentially the card business, they essentially put in the hand of customers, there's no contract that anyone needs to sign. It's like the more they use it, the more revenue you make. And you can just focus on making the product as good as possible so that they use it as much as possible. And it was refreshing. I was like, great. Like you just put this card in the hands of a person and more useful it is to them, the more use it.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the other bank, and that's the reputation they have, which is great. And we were in partnership conversations with them, frankly. They were interested in building differentiations for the card product because, I mean, at the time, and frankly, to this day, a lot of the consumer card products still fail different versions of the same product just marketed differently. So they were interested in differentiating through product and partnerships. And we're interested in figuring out who had recently purchased something at Amazon or Walmart. So we're in partnership conversations with Capital One and around the same time. We're getting a lot of these legal challenges. It's clear that we needed more firepower, whether in the form of partnerships or in the form of capital just to withstand the storm. And quickly those partnership conversations with Capital One turned into acquisition conversations. We get really interested because our visions were clearly very aligned.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess we should go back to that. The Parapist story was very instrumental in us wanting to start ramp, to be honest, because at the time that we sold Parabis, we weren't really looking to sell the business. We were looking for partners that would help us grow. And we thought about it in that way. It was like, well, we know Paribus is really great. It drives a lot of value to people who have chopped online in very predictable ways. And we're looking for partners who could help us figure out who shopped online recently so that we can get in front of them, make a compelling pitch, and hopefully convert them into a user. And who better for that than the credit card companies? They know exactly who made a purchase at Amazon or Walmart or JET.com at the time recently. We got to meet the team at Capital One and really enjoyed working with them. They're a lot more tech savvy than most of them.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just. To never give up to some extent. I never see the possibility of using. Being killed as an option, to be honest with you. Like, I'm constantly looking for the multiple ways that we can withstand a challenge and how we survive. And I see the risk when that happens as us endlessly talking about the options and not maybe taking enough action. So I try to get into gear really quickly so that we could just start acting on the ways that we will survive and I'll get killed. When a challenge happens, I tend to look through all the ways that we succeed and maximize the chances that we do. And I think the companies that don't do that well tend to Die because I spent a lot of time thinking and talking and not enough time doing as opposed to because they don't see the options, frankly.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our response was great, we'd be happy to get out a call with your team that is helping us build this in the most secure way possible. And we got on a call with, I think it was either Andy Jassy or someone very senior on his team at the time when he was running AWS to just go through our architecture and how we were building this. It seemed to me on the call that they were actually very excited about what we were building. I was like, this is really cool. We liked this and we ended up the call with this understanding that AWS was actually really happy with us and that our problem was with Amazon retail. It ended up getting resolved. But just as a really tiny company being attacked or attacked by the legal teams of really massive companies feels really, really scary at the time. But in a way, like also validating.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was we get a letter from Amazon around how we were supposedly compromising the security of the accounts of their users. And I thought it was really funny at the time because a lot of the product that we had built was one on AWS and two with the help of a lot of AWS architects in order to make sure that it was built as well as possible and as secure as possible for the users.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a period of time, I think it was a couple weeks where we were getting angry letters and cease and desist from multiple retailers. And we're getting these letters from notorious law firms that we had heard of and were a team of 12, 13 engineers fresh out of college and trying to Google the name of the person sending us a letter or the name of their firms like, oh my God, this is a multi-thousand people law firm that represents the largest corporations. And my hunch was would be to send them a, I'm sorry response. And I'm like, okay, we can't really do this. What do we have to do here? And the way we responded to it is just trying to explain in very logical terms what we were doing and why it was good for consumers and why they should care, which was really funny. But one of those crazy experiences.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of, well, we want to make sure that there are no bugs. It's like, you know what's one great way to make sure that you have no bugs? Don't chip anything. Don't write any code. You will have no bugs. And that's the problem with that approach. So I think if you are solving for great outcome and great impact, you want things to be breaking.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About your capabilities, I often find it a much better way to build credibility with them and trust if things break and you fix them very quickly as opposed to if they just don't care and don't notice anything by the products. One of my favorite things to do is just be very quick to respond when a customer brings up something that's broken or we notice a SAPAR experience in the product and we see it as a personal challenge. How quickly can we notice and how quickly we can fix it?”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've innovated a ton pulling receipts from a mailbox and trying to match them as best you can to the right transaction. It's like, well, if it works, it's amazing. If it doesn't work, it's whatever. No one's going to feel it. No one's going to see it. It's just that a receipt was a match. That's fine. No other company is able to match receipts nearly as good as we are. So it's okay. If you are, let's say, optimizing any form or experience on the website, it's like, well, the button is non-functional for a couple minutes or the colors change or the font is not correct, that's fine. Someone will complain about it and you'll fix it very quickly. It's okay. And to this day, there are little parts of RAMP that are probably breaking 10 times a day and we're fixing them like 20 times a day and no one's really noticing, especially early on, I think when you have customers that already perceive you as a small startup and a small company and may have some doubt.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only brought with us to ramp with some nuances, obviously. I would say like the first big split that we made that ramp in the way we build product is there are parts of ramp that we should build in a way that they will never break. And we got to be very careful the way we built them and experience in building those systems is very valuable. And there are other parts of ramp where we need to iterate very quickly, assume that it's going to break very quickly. Well, that it's going to break, but we need to improve incredibly fast. And we split the product and engineering teams along that boundary relatively quickly. So anything that touched money, money movement, risk falls in the category of you need to build it right and make sure it doesn't break and assume that you're not going to have to innovate that much, frankly, on it. It's like you just need to build that system really well. And there are a lot of parts of ramp where”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say a lot of pragmatism in engineering systems, this idea that you're never going to really build the perfect system, so you're better off building something quickly that will break in very predictable ways and you're able to recover from incredibly quickly. So the idea with Paribus was you start with the assumption that things will break, that you are trying to speed up the process of fixing them quickly when they break as opposed to building the system that will never break. And it is very different from how I'd say most experienced engineers learn how to do engineering at larger companies where you are trying to build like a great system that will not break and that will withstand the test of time. And there's a beauty to that as well, but that's very different from the way we build things at Paribus. So the name of the game at Paribus is build it very quickly and make sure that it breaks predictably. And a lot of these lessons, we certainly...”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are building products on top of the websites of retailers who, one, don't want us there, two are changing their pages all the time, and three are heavily incentivized to make it harder for us over time. And when we started building Paribus around that time, Amazon still used to send receipts to your inbox. I don't know if you remember this, but you used to get a full... Pretty sure that we were running one of the largest scraping operations in the US at the time going through some point billions of emails per day and tens of millions of receipts per day.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're going to armed the rebels, essentially. We're going to build a technology for consumers, the best technology possible to try and minimize the amount of pain in their online shopping experience and maximize the amount of money that they can recoup after the fact by holding retailers accountable to their guarantees. And we did that incredibly effectively. And it was very popular. As you can imagine, like if you're a customer or a consumer and you see a value prop of click a button, save money, it's free, but it's pretty great value prop. So it grew incredibly quickly. I think within the span of a year where we're like approaching a million users, it's growing very fast. And the experience of building it was incredibly challenging because unlike RAMP or unlike every most tech companies, you are building a product on top of a very unpredictable foundation.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Click that button. Just do it. If something changes, we'll get it back for you. But they're also banking on the fact that no one really checks the prices of the items they buy after they bought them. With Paribus, we just automated all of it. The idea was like, well, all these retailers have armies of data scientists working for them to price discretion.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All online retailers had some form of promise to their customers that if prices were to drop and to change, there was a best price guarantee or a price match guarantee. And the reason they do this is because they want to give their customers the confidence to just”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price of every single one of those items every day on Amazon. And you could do this with VBA. The programming language really doesn't matter. You can open a web browser, get to the right page, and pull the price and do it in a loop. And that was the first version of Paribus, when we were trying to figure out, is there a business there? Are prices changing quickly enough that there's enough money to be saved for customers, that there's a business model there? And clearly there was. Even in the first month that we were tracking prices, we not only noticed that, yes, prices were changing, but the rate at which those changes was happening in that one month in 2014 was increasing over the course of a month. And that trend essentially never stopped. So we quickly realized that there was a business there. Prices were changing incredibly quickly. And at the same time,”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were put on these projects, really smart, very ambitious people to do a lot of manual work that could be done a lot more efficiently with software. And every time I would try to suggest that we write a little bit of software, I would get maybe a nod and yeah, that makes sense. But the incentive just weren't aligned because the consulting firms are pricing for a number of people spending time on projects. So no one really had the incentive to minimize the time spent on projects and just maximize the value. But even then, I find myself running quite a bit of software during my consulting days, which is probably why the first version of Paribus that we built was essentially me writing VBA macros in Excel to track prices. So the very first version of Paribus was an Excel spreadsheet that had a set of SKUs and a job running in the background that would check.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To employ data teams and dynamically pricing their items to try and maximize their revenue. I was in consulting at a time a little discontent as well. I guess that's maybe the recurring theme. It's like I kept feeling that we were”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. Well, Preibus was an interesting one. I started Paribus with Eric, so same co founder as Ramp, obviously. Eric and I at a time were both fresh college graduates in New York working at our first jobs, both incredibly busy at work. We were buying a lot of our supplies on Amazon, online. And we were essentially doing a lot of online shopping. And Eric notices after a trip that the price that he had paid for a flight for his girlfriend at the time was very different than the price that someone else paid. And he notices that there's a discrepancy in the way items are priced online. And we were very lucky in a sense because that was around the same time that data science was starting to become that function that is very key for really everyone, but online retailers in particular.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best part about it all is the friends I've made along the way. Some of my best friends to this day I've met through RSI was a very fun experience.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, what Viraj was doing was buying lots of video news feeds from all over the country. So they'd buy like the news feeds of the local ABC station in small town in Texas all over the U.S. So they'd buy all those TV news feeds, convert the speech to text, and then classify the text using Markov chains. And a lot of techniques that we're using are essentially like the ancestors of what LLMs rely on, right? It's a lot of the best technology available for doing natural language processing at the time. And my research project involved training these models that they were using a lot more efficiently than they were. So very interesting. At the time, the technology was very nascent, but it was a very cool experience. And I guess”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“RSI was dead. I was on my own with another 67 year or so students, all brilliant, incredibly talented. And even before coming for the program, we had to pick what our research subject or topic would be. And I had picked computer science at the time thinking that, great, I'm going to learn a lot more about it. And it turns out that the expectation was that I would do computer science research and not learn about computer science. That's where I was essentially put under, I guess a lot of stress is like, great, I not only need to do some research, but I also need to teach myself a lot more in a very, very short period of time. It was a fascinating experience where I ended up working at this small startup off of Kendall subway stop in Boston, the Kendall T-Stop called Viraj.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Programs, and that's when I hear about a summer science program that was hosted at MIT called Research Science Institute, RSI. So I ended up looking into that program and applying and coming a year and a half before college in 2006 to MIT for the research science institute, which was very transformative experience. It was my first time in the US by”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even before coming, I would trap myself in libraries in Lebanon and just find books and magazines that I was interested in. And I still remember just opening up a bunch of science magazines in particular and just looking at the latest advancements, discoveries. And every time I'd look at a new discovery that was made, it was scientists at MIT or researchers at MIT and just the name MIT just kept coming up as a place where a lot of incredible engineering discoveries were made. As a result, I was fascinated by MIT as a school. And then I look around, I guess, my high school and there was one person a couple years ahead of me who had gone to study MIT. So I reached out to them and asked them, what is it like? What's a good way for me to, I guess, expose myself to type of work being done at MIT? Do they offer any summer science?”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to do the best you can so that you maximize your chances of getting out of here and getting into the best school that you can so that you can get a visa and build a better life for yourself abroad is very important. I was living with that stress maybe hanging over my head in a country that was constantly exposed to all sorts of risks that I've learned to live with external risk very well, I would say it doesn't really phase me.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would certainly have to start in Lebanon and Beirut, which is where I grew up, and I grew up in a very, I guess, interesting period of Lebanon's history because I was born right at the end of the civil war. And if you rewind the clock a lot in Lebanon, you'll see that it's always been periods of peace followed by some form of conflict and war. And I was born in 89, 90, and I spent the first 16, 17 years of my life there. And it was a relatively calm period. Always spurts of conflict, but nothing really major. But you could tell growing up there that a lot of the previous generation was scarred from the war and everyone was kind of living on edge. So in other words, I'd say a sense that things are very ephemeral and could disappear very quickly was there in the air. And or in a sense from my parents of, hey, you're going to.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, so much. It is on the order of 100 plus billion dollars per year. If anything, I think there's something interesting happening today where you'd argue that probably the most primary thing that businesses spend on is payroll for a lot of businesses. But as the world is shifting towards using more and more AI and more and more agents that are built by other companies, it's very likely that more of that payroll spend will essentially become software spend. I think it's only growing.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, over time, I mean, I would say that part of the intent is to make it a lot easier to build and run companies without having to be finance operations experts. You can worry about your company, your mission, whether it's a restaurant or a soccer team or really whatever it is without having to be a finance expert. It can run on autopilot.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. So that rent, we're building a finance automation platform. It's for finance teams of companies of all sizes, from startups to large 100,000 plus employee companies. It helps those finance teams run everything from expenses, procurement workflows, account payable workflows, accounting automation, reporting as it relates to the way that they are spending money in their company. And a lot of our focus is in building systems and product that automate a lot of the busy work away. And we've tried to essentially stitch together a lot of the workflows that today are very desperate, can live on 10 or 20 different systems and as a result result in Incredible inefficiencies for most businesses that are now closing their books in weeks and a month instead of essentially having a live view of what's going on in their business.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company would I join them? Or would I start a company with that person if circumstances were different? That is the only bar. Like if I had to summarize my interview would just be that. And that comes from the ability to persevere in the face of challenge and continuously solve a hard problems because at the end of the day a company is just a collection of people solving problems together one after the next and they keep getting more difficult and bigger and the question is how much can you endure for how long? And the best way to do that very well is to be on that journey with people who are very aligned, aligned on the values, the mission and this is the journey that they're on. There are always going to be more problems. The job is never going to be done. Hopefully we're enjoying solving these problems together for a very, very, very long time.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source