YouSaid · the spoken record

Sri Batchu

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-06-25
most recent: 2023-06-25
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

“Becomes clear, even if the measurement framework isn't perfect. And so that's kind of what we use. And the other thing that we just had as cadence is we would actually update all of the translations every six months for the new planning cycle based on new information that we knew on how moving X impacts Mao.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Formula. And I think in general, the planning process is not perfect, right? You can have a financial plan in Excel and the reality can diverge quite a bit. The only thing you can be certain of is that you're not going to accomplish exactly the plan. So we did a couple of things to that. One is like, you know, setting a culture of like, we know this isn't perfect. This is like 70, 30, 80, 20. It's to guide. So like we wouldn't use the translation factor to make a marginal decision, right? Like, should we something's 5% or 10% off? Those are done based on judgment because at the end of the day, regardless of what metric framework you use, marginal decisions are marginal for a reason. They're really hard things to decide. And so the framework helped with just reducing the cognitive overload of decision making to only those that are marginal, right? So the ones that are obvious that are going to have big impact.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the team on their day-to-day for the sprints, whatever, are looking at their own metric, but for the purpose of planning and resource allocation and reporting, we would use the translation layers to actually just look at everything on a mall basis.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, orderer So, like monthly active users basically is what it is, but we call them orders because users can just log in and not order, right? Got it. You're actually ordering on the platform.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of doing something like that is that it also helps you cross prioritize much easier, right? Should we add more engineering to this team? Should we add more budget to that team? It's like, okay, well, what's the MAUMAC? Like where is there more mile per dollar or per engineer being built? And it just really helped us unify and move together.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making the checkout flow slightly better or faster or something like that. So, for example, that's a good example, right? It's like, okay, well, so we're going to go that team on Mao. Like, how are they going to move monthly active orders by making the checkout flow slightly better? Maybe they can have an impact or maybe not. And so one of the things that we did is the actual local team has their own metric that they can directly influence. Like you want to actually, you know, hold people accountable for things that they can influence. And then we created via the finance and data team a translation layer for every team's metric into Mao. It would be like if you got one extra weekly order because of your checkout flow from the same customer, it would have like point X impact on the company's MAL. And then we would just roll up all project plans as well as project impact back into this singular biometric. And the other benefit.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like having two, right? One is something around volume and growth. And you want that to be a very motivating and intuitive for people to understand. And also, B, something that the growth teams can directly impact. Revenue is, for better or worse, more important to the company, but also much farther down the line of whether or not the growth team can impact that, right? And so Instacart, for example, are North Star metric for growth was monthly active orders. And that's what we all rallied around and looked at every day. How are Mao doing? And then obviously we had a large growth in consumer engineering team at Instacart, 300 plus people. There are people working on every single corner of the app and outside of the app on acquisition to drive growth. And it's like some of the stuff is like minutia, right? It's like.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like an MVP kind of mentality for product and non product projects, right? Where people can fail and learn quickly and iterate quickly. So I think that part of it is more important than the specific people or their functions in many ways to me, especially when you're starting to build a growth engine. It's like, can you build a set of people that can generate new ideas and evaluate them effectively and move quickly is really what you're trying to design for.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People talk a lot about what should the right design of the team be or profiles of people on the team, et cetera. I'm happy to talk about what are the right profiles of people. I think that's an important conversation. But I think design of the team, people often, I think it's a red herring about team structure and team design and what's the right one, et cetera. I think most of that is irrelevant. What actually matters is culture and rituals and cadences rather than the team itself. And so a great growth engine and a great growth team is one that where you've set the culture, like set very simple North Star metrics, usually one at most two, right? And you've created a culture of defining hypotheses that are data driven and a culture where that can be executed quickly and have”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the audiences that you get with each of these tactics? And so we do both obviously get some earned coverage in these newsletters and other tactics. And we pay for some and we advertise in other cases. And what we tend to find is like these are great reach, but they tend to work very well for actually hiring. It improves RAMP's reputation as a company for recruiting and hiring, which helps. And they help with a certain audience of customers, which is typically tech founders and folks close to the tech ecosystem. But as I mentioned, the vast majority of the world is not startups. And the majority of Ramps customers are no longer tech in startups. And so as we're thinking about ways to grow, I think channels like these are”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you said is exactly right is you have to be thoughtful about your PR moments. Like everybody wants to announce things about themselves. That's not necessarily interesting for the press or for an audience. And so thinking about how do you compile enough value to the general audience? So our fundraising announcements usually also have some additional color on something unique about the business that we share to provide more value to readers.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one thing that's been interesting is Ramps' ability to leverage PR as a growth machine. And as you've seen, I've got a fantastic PR in Comms team, and we get a lot of deserved good press through that. And one thing that's been interesting is our fundraising also as a growth strategy, kind of like not obviously explicitly. We've got very clear goals for our fundraising. But what we have seen is anytime that we've been fundraising and we've been using that as an effective way of creating a market moment, it's driven actually a non-trivial amount of top of funnel for us.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, allocate more to channels that are more efficient as long as they're scalable, right? And so the more that we can push customer awareness via owned and earned media, the better for us. And so we've got a few different strategies on that front. But we're also working on making our other channels more efficient by the day.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'll say on that front is, look, we, like everybody else, are always focused on driving more efficiency in our growth engine. There are some channels that, you know, and we have a diversified portfolio of bets, right? One thing that's kind of interesting about the world of growth today, I think historically people that used to run growth were folks that had a marketing or kind of a product background. And what you're seeing these days, I think, are more folks like me who actually come from an investor analytics background to lead growth teams because growth has become more and more about a diversified portfolio of bets at a reasonable ROI and building a system that's designed around experimentation and data oriented, right? So the reason I say all of that is our goal is to over time, of course, make all of our channels more efficient, but”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. And by the way, this is probably the first time I'm sharing this. I don't think Brand employees necessarily know this. I don't think we've actually shared this. I just heard it from our IT person recently, and I thought that was kind of a fun step.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I completely agree with you. I do think, especially earlier in your career, hard work is so important both for learning but also impact. And it's a tough balance that a lot of successful companies struggle with. I think my biggest learnings of AI, it's like some of it is like self-selection, right? You're hiring people that are excited about doing this work and then this way of working. But at least I tend to find the people that I've worked with that are highly successful. Ours are not the problem. It's really autonomy, flexibility, and mission alignment and the general happiness that they get from their work. And so that's what I...”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's cultural in terms of how we operate, but we also have templates, like our people team has a template on how to do a calendar audit properly and things like that. So we've tried to create some learning materials as well for folks that are new to get into the flow of way of working.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think the expectation is necessarily that one constantly responds, but it is something that I have seen people are good at. And so I think one of the things that, again, not like a novel productivity tool, but something that RAMP does do is just trying to think about focus time and response times and using calendar blocking to really effectively manage your time that way and doing calendar audits of yourself as well as of your team to say, okay, what are your highest priorities for this day, this month, and how does your calendar reflect your priorities? Because in many ways you shift your calendar. And so thinking about how are you spending your time and blocking your time?”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see the cycle time thing in terms of responsiveness from everybody at RAM. And I think typically what you tend to see is like as companies get bigger, they evolve off of Slack to email and like everything just kind of moves a little bit slower and there's process. And there's obviously a lot of good parts of that. But Ramp, what I noticed when I joined and true to this day is like how quickly people will respond on Slack and jump on things. And even if they don't complete it, there's very clear action item on who the owner will be and what the deadline will be, even if it's not. And that to me was always very impressive. And I think it's one of those things we build in public. So everything is like very visible so you can see how this is working across teams. And I'm glad that we've been able to kind of maintain that culture even as we've gotten much bigger.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's always been there. It's just amping it up, you know, on how much time is passing. It could be stressful at times, but I think that the mitigating factor is that it's been able, you know, as you know, A players want to work with A players, attract A players, and retain A players and RAM has done a really great job of hiring people that are fantastic that can work in this environment well and are motivated by the success and the winning from the sort of culture.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At every board meeting, every all hands. It's just to remind people that we don't work in years, quarters, you know, weeks. We work in days. Each day matters. And so never put out something tomorrow that you can get done today. And that bias to action really permeates not just in the product teams, but everywhere. So our growth team, which as I just described, is extremely cross-functional. A lot of marketing folks and other expertise on the team. But we work a lot like a product team. We work on two week sprints. We cross prioritize across these teams. And we work all together rather than in kind of separate silos within the growth team.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. And Keith is amazing and probably one of the smartest investors that I've ever had the good fortune of working with both here as well as at Open Door. And I'll say he's absolutely right about that. And what you kind of see internally is what I'll say is a razor sharp focus on reducing cycle time and bias to action. And how are we reducing cycle time? I think it's basically the core of it culturally to me is getting people to think about smaller units of time for decision making. Seems obvious, but I think you really have to reinforce it culturally. So one thing that Eric, our CEO, does, which I don't know if you've heard externally, is we have like days.rank.com where we can see how many days it's been since the founding of ramp internally. And it's day 1529 at ramp. He has that number of days.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. There's a self-serve activation inch team as well. And then I missed, of course, there's SEO and kind of like website and bound lead channel management team”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've done testing of new channels that don't necessarily fit into a very, and that includes new online platforms. They've done some interesting stuff on TikTok and Reddit and other places, things like that. They focused on kind of referrals and how to make that a more delightful experience for the customers, first party events, things like that. Things that are often kind of smaller scale. And if they work, we can invest more and make them larger scale later.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've got an organization today that might evolve and if we get to that topic we can talk about it. But historically the way we've been organized is we've got channel-based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel. So we've got a paid marketing team, a life cycle CRM team. We've got a field marketing team, et cetera. And then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting growth and sales and helping each of these channels be more effective that's dedicated to growth. And then separate from that, we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or skunk works type of team that works on cross-channel. Just things that don't neatly fit into a box that we think could be cool or fun to try to just do more experimentation at its cross-channel cross-team.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's incredibly helpful to our sales team and it's one of our most efficient channels, as I've mentioned. So I think that there is something unique about our ability to bring technology to every channel.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the above, helping find the right prospects, sending them the right messaging, as well as prioritizing responses and drafting potential responses for the team as well.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a lot of companies do it differently. I think what works really well with RAMP is that we have the same shared goal, which is the pipeline driven and the payback period of the channel. It's kind of unique to RAMP where the engineers feel ownership of the quota. They're not like owning product metrics or what have you on. There are obviously, of course, interim and input metrics that are important, but they really do feel accountable for the pipeline driven and the efficiency driven by that team. And I think that naturally allows them bottom up to come up with the right projects that they think will have maximal impact on efficiency and top line.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason for that is because we actually have a growth engineering team that's dedicated to supporting that efficiency, including adjusting third-party data and using AI to automate much of their workflows, et cetera. And we've been doing this well before AI has become the buzzword dujour for a lot of folks. But this is something we've had this team for almost two years now that's been working on sales automation and data to just make our sales teams more efficient. But we've got similar types of mandates for every channel that we invest in and thinking about how do we form this better customer and prospect data and how do we automate and technologize it so that we can build that competitive mode for each channel.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than going into specifics, one thing I'll say about the growth system today is if you were to look at what percentage of our business comes from outbound sales, paid marketing field, and then a bunch of other channels, and you compare it against industry benchmarks. I think the secret sauce of RAMP is not that we've found a channel that's like unique and that we've overinvested or underinvested. I don't think our distribution would be not that far off from looking at other companies at our size and stage. I think what we've done differently is we've really focused on making all of those investments very much driven by technology and data. And so like one example that I'll give you is our sales teams are actually incredibly efficient by any metric that we look at and we obviously benchmark them.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, many of our early customers have grown quite a bit. And our whole strategy is to be safe companies time and money so they can redeploy that in other ways for their own growth or other objectives. And we obviously are growing our products suite as well, like BillPay, Flex, et cetera, where our customers can spend more money on RAM and get more value out of RAM. Having said all of that, what's interesting is the vast majority of our growth back then and even to this day is via new customer acquisition. It's just we are adding so many more customers that the growth of our customers, while strong and important part of our growth lever, is not nearly as material as you might think.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll say it was more founders and executives of customers that can use RAM. Certainly we have a fantastic group of very sophisticated ambassadors who have made introductions to RAMP as well. And that helped. But I will say that is not as big of a channel as one might expect because companies have their own decision making frameworks for selecting a product like Ramp. And the investor opinion and recommendation matters, but it turns out it doesn't matter maybe as much as another customer who's actually used the product that they know or are actually experiencing the product.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example that I can think of is Eight Sleep founder, has been very close to the ramp. Same with the POP founder and a bunch of VC firms that are investors in the company are also customers of the company.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that we're on the cap table where the founders were on the cap table for. RAMP today is actually not majority startups or tech companies anymore. The vast majority of our customers are mid-marketed enterprises where our revenue comes from. But there's a lot of love among the tech founder community because of the early days, both the product quality as well as all of these investors that RAM got.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you're certainly right on the product side. Obviously, you've recently written about Duramps product engine with Jeff. And there's been incredible product market fit because of a product team that deeply understood the customer experience. And I think that's certainly helped initial word of mouth. One thing that I did want to point out that Ramp did that was interesting is, you know, obviously Eric and Kareem, the co-founders of RAMP, were previous founders of another company that they had a successful exit on. So they had a strong reputation as founders and kind of came in with the right set of experience to build RAMP. And one of the things that they did is what I call kind of cap table as a growth strategy where they did a great job of getting a large number of early stage founders and other influential operators and advisors onto the CAP table at the company. And many of our initial customers were these companies.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Publicly disclosed that last year we grew Forex on top of that very sizable base from the year prior. And Okta actually released some recent stats on fastest growing software companies among SMB and mid-market and RAMP is by far the fastest growing despite the fact that a bunch of others on the list were materially smaller. still very lean for the amount of growth we're under 500 people roughly today at that scale and so definitely have a much higher kind of you know revenue for employee than some of our competitors and others in the space and yeah i mean we've got a very thoughtful and smart finance team that i've worked with actually closely our old head of strategic finance at instacart and they set ambitious goals for us on growth and uh and i'm happy to say we've consistently beat those ambitious goals over the last 16 months or 18 months since i joined”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you know of Paki and he's done great analysis where he shared this work and compared us to a bunch of other companies when he released this a year ago, we were the fastest growing company to $100 million of annualized revenue at the time. I don't know if there's been other since, but certainly not in the fintech category as far as I know.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan, and I've been following the podcast and the newsletter. So excited again.”
2023-06-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source