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

“I like about this is from the very start at ramp, we tried to create a culture where people have mutual accountability to each other as opposed to just top-down culture where you have accountability to your manager. And people want to do well because their peers, their colleagues and other teams depend on them. So that creates a culture where sales cares a lot about product and product care is a lot about sales and marketing cares about finance and vice versa. That's probably where this comes from. We all need to be selling our products. We all need to be making the customer experience better. We all need to be advising our product builders on what we're hearing from customers so that we can take their feedback into consideration. I just think it works. If I go back to the early days of ramp, the way I look at it is my most important filter for the interviews I used to do early and still do to this day is if this person was starting the company and it was looking to join.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On administrative BS and things that don't move the needle. It's not being spent on more training for doctors or healthcare providers. It's not being spent on more training for teachers and better educational outcomes. It's being spent on a lot of bureaucracy and BS that doesn't move the needle. And I think a lot of that is what we are trying very hard to reduce. At the end of the day, we serve the companies that are our customers. I'm sure they have a lot of, they feel a lot of drag and they might feel like things are moving slower than they would like to. And we want to play a big part in accelerating that.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next six months and the next year. So that's part of it. The other one is I feel like if things were good and we didn't really have problems, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. Like, what are we doing here if the job's actually done? And the good thing is the job's never done. We could always push it further, do better. There's always more time that could be shaved off of every single user interaction experience. As I'm talking, I'm visualizing these charts that I'm sure you've seen every time I look at them, I get a bit frustrated of amounts spent in the US on healthcare in total or on education. And you see these charts that have been going up every decade for the past couple decades where we spend more and more and a lot of people would say that the outcomes are not necessarily probably better, but not as much as you would expect given the spending. If you dig in a little bit deeper, I was like, where's all that spending going? It's very obvious that it's just being wasted.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably two reasons for it. One is I forget the exact quote from Jeff Bezos in one of his letters. I really believe that a lot of the results that you are seeing today at RAMP are due to the efforts that we put in in solving the problems six months to a year ago. So the current quarter was baked in a couple months ago. So I always find it a little bit weird to celebrate lagging indicators today. And I don't know, I often think that they put at risk some of the very important work that we are trying to do today in solving the problems that we have today because people might feel like, oh, things are going amazingly well. We don't really have any problems and that's not true. There are always problems and always ways to make things better, faster, more efficient, et cetera. So just this element of like, hey, we're working on such important things. And if we don't realize that they're really important, we might mess up.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You keep looking at every interaction that you have with a customer, right? It could be an email, it could be a form. And then you ask yourself, how can I figure out the answer to that question myself without asking the customer? Or if I'm telling the customer to do X, why can't I do it for them? So for example, I'm sure you've gotten one of those error messages from a product that you've used that will tell you, hey, Patrick, you tried to do X. It didn't work. You might want to try one retrying the payment or the transaction, two, changing your bank account details or something like this. Well, instead of doing this, we could retry it ourselves, for example. And if we are asking you to change your banking details or to submit a piece of information instead of just telling you an email, like go to our website and submit your information, we could have a form right there that allows you to submit your information in the email. So there's always a way to skip a step and make it a little bit faster. We're essentially always obsessing over that.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would challenge you to find anyone who enjoys using concur, for example. There's a lot of business software that was built in that way, no care for the user experience. And when we set out to build ramp, we wanted the user experience of an Instagram but applied to business software. Design obsession has helped us a lot and just polishing every single interaction, making sure that we only ask questions that are absolutely necessary, that we can prefill any form that can be pre-filled so that you have as little work to do as a user of the product. And over time, we got even better at this because we get even more data about how people want to use the product and we can skip even more steps. And that obsession over design really turned into an obsession over minimizing the amount of time people spend in our app.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still go back to the early days and why a lot of people even picked us when we didn't have that much credibility or social proofing. I'd say a lot of it was our obsession over wanting to build consumer grade user experience for a business product. You think about a lot of the business products that were built in a previous generation, they were essentially built for decision makers. So you think about building an HR tool or anything. It's like, well, who's a decision maker? Like, well, that person on the team, great. It's like, we're going to build it for them. We're going to pitch it to them and we're just going to convince them to switch to us. And once they do, we're going to care a lot less about them. And then you end up with these business software that is used at a company that maybe solves the problem of the one decision maker but makes everyone else at the company very miserable. So you solve one person's problem, but you give everyone else of the company just a small paper cut every day. And we wanted to reverse that.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you receive an invoice as a company, what do you do? It's like, well, you do a couple things. One, you make sure that the invoice is not fraudulent, maybe. You make sure that you're being invoiced for a product that you've actually ordered, a product that you've actually received. You make sure that the price matches what you had negotiated. So there's a lot of steps that actually happen before and after any payment that a company makes. A lot of the work that we're doing right now is because we have so many interesting customers and they're using the product to run their finances, we can infer a lot of these policies through their behavior. And a lot of those policies that we're inferring are driving the next generation of agents that we're building.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something is in policy or not, and do that a lot more efficiently than any human. So you have a 24 7 live enforcement of your policy. And not only that, but as it runs over time, it gets better at advising how to make the policy a little bit clearer or easier to interpret and your policy becomes better and better over time. Maybe to make that a little bit simpler, instead of having deterministic codes tell software what transactions are in policy or not, you essentially have this living breathing text document that can evolve over time that's guiding an agent that has access to tools like your calendar, email, et cetera, on how to classify transactions. And that same principle applies in so many different parts of the company. Now, the good thing about expense policies is most companies have them, but companies do all sorts of things that sometimes are not written down that can be very easily automated by agents. So for example,”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People make transactions, and before they make the transactions, sometimes they'll go and check the expense report. Sometimes they try to remember it from memory. They'll make a transaction. They'll file an expense report, and some manager will try to make sure that some manager or someone on the finance team will try to make sure that the expense that was made by the employee actually abides by the rules of the expense policy. It's very manual. Generally, the transactions are missing context, so there's a lot of back and forth between the people enforcing the policy and the people who made the transaction. It takes a lot of time. So we've built our policy agents in a way that it has more context about the transaction than most people reviewing those transactions today. So it's integrated with your calendar. It's integrated with your email. It knows your expense policy, et cetera. And more context about the policy than any employee. So it can run 24-7 as transactions come in and apply the logic of the expense policy against these transactions and decide whether”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot more code written for you, and then you're reviewing it. And that's cool. But I think that next phase that we're entering and the one that I'm seeing in our company is one where you start thinking about these LLMs really as part of your product and you're programming them. So you're no longer writing the same old code that you used to write with the help of LLMs. Your code is the LLM now. Your code is the LLM plus instructions and an infinite loop. So you're essentially writing those agents. We're in the middle of that right now. Do you have a favorite example of that so far that you've actually deployed and is working? Yeah, of course. I'd say the most obvious one is what you call internally the policy agents. So most companies have a travel expense management policy. It's generally a document. Sometimes it's well written and clear and sometimes it's not, but that's essentially a document that you write to drive the behaviors of people in the company and how they manage their expenses. In the old world,”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benefit in another week, you have an article from someone you think highly of, or you trust saying that their company has adopted AI in some part of the organization. It's had an immense impact on them. So it's still early. It's obvious to me that the impact of adopting the technology are transformative, but a lot of companies are still stuck in the very early phases. And I would describe the first, very early phase as you are using those LLMs to do the same work that you were doing before, maybe a little bit faster or more efficiently. So if you're a developer, for example, you are using AI to help you write a little bit more code. So you're not sure on how to write the next couple of lines of codes. You go to a chat GPT, you go to an LLM and have it give you advice. You get some code, you copy it, you paste it. Maybe you go a little bit further and you start using these agents where you describe your problem in English and you use a cognition or a cursor and then you get.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are describing us as no longer an upstart. I still haven't internalized this, to be honest with you. The most exciting aspect of being a startup is that you get to grow very fast, make decisions quickly, and move quickly. So we are trying to maintain that as much as we can. And we do this by essentially breaking up all the different problems we're trying to go after and give small teams full autonomy over these problems. So every time I spent some time with a small part of the company, it does feel like they have full autonomy over the problem they're going after and the way they're building. And I'd say with what's going on with AI advancements and the different ways that companies are starting to build is that every company is trying to figure out how to adopt those new technologies and benefit from them. And you're still in the phase where you have like these articles coming out every couple weeks that are mixed. Some will say like, oh, companies are adopting AI, but not seeing any.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to start this conversation at the very end, which is today, because you have one of the most unique perspectives on what's going on in the world as this technology paradigm is shifting, where you're not an upstart anymore. You're a big established company. But at the same time, you run the company like an upstart, like it's day one, and you're up against massive incumbents. And so the reason I'm interested in this cocktail is this is going to happen in every industry where there's big, stodgy incumbents that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. There's going to be fast, talented young companies that challenge them. And so I'm curious for you to detail what it's like to be in that position right now, where you're past a billion in revenue. You're one of the fastest companies ever to go to that size in five, six years. And you're up against Amex and companies like this. What does that feel like? What is the competitive battlefield feel like to you today? It's very exciting.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software, the psychology behind his divinely discontent management style, and why he believes technical founders will dominate this era because they can see the possibilities that others miss. Please enjoy my conversation with Karim Matia.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest today is Kareem Tartia. Kareem is the co-founder and CTO of RAMP, the fastest growing finance automation platform in history, reaching over a billion in revenue in just over five years. RAMP is, of course, also our presenting sponsor, so I'm obviously very biased in how highly I think about RAMP and about Kareem. But this interview was not a part of that sponsorship. I simply view Kareem as one of the best operators active today. Ramp is building what Kareem calls self-driving finance using AI agents to automate everything from expense policy enforcement to invoice processing, eliminating the bureaucratic waste that plagues modern businesses. Kream shares his framework for moving from using AI as a productivity tool to programming AI as your actual product. Our discussion captures the relentless iteration speed and technical depth required to build generational companies in the age of AI. We explore his systematic approach to building consumer-grade experiences for business.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at join Colossus.com.”
2025-10-21 · Invest Like the Best · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source