The Tech Sales Newsletter #91: Ramping up
This week we will take a break from investigative tech sales journalism and review the tech sales opportunity at a well-rated and respected company.
The key takeaway
For tech sales: Ramp is a great tech sales opportunity for those interested in a high-growth company at the intersection of fintech and productivity.
For investors: Betting on visionary founders on their second attempt is probably the most obvious path to ROI in the industry.
So why is Ramp interesting?
Technically, the company wants to compete in a very crowded, but very lucrative space (if played well) - the fintech platform for finance operations.
Source: Ramp
The edge here is offering an all-in-one platform based on a modern architecture. The con is that every single component where they compete has a significant number of both incumbents and new disruptors trying to carve a space for themselves.
Since financial operations are essentially a mandatory part of being able to run any sort of business outside of one-person consulting, the TAM is, for all intents and purposes, "uncapped".
Source: Ramp
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Let’s try to dig through the strategy based on an interview with Eric Glyman, the CEO. First, this is what the core pitch is from their point of view:
Zero-Touch Automation: The most effective AI implementations often operate invisibly in the background rather than through chat interfaces. While conversational AI has its place, the goal should be “zero touch” experiences where manual work is eliminated entirely—like expense reports that complete themselves automatically when a card is used.
Lead with the benefit: Ramp exists to save finance teams time and money—not to be an “AI-driven finance tool.” When implementing AI, focus marketing and product development on concrete outcomes rather than the underlying technology. As Glyman notes, it’s nearly impossible to use Ramp without engaging with AI, but customers care about results like faster expense processing and automated bookkeeping, not the technological sophistication behind these features.
Customer-Centric Product Development: Product teams must maintain direct customer contact to build truly transformative AI solutions. Engineers should regularly interact with customers, own metrics, and deeply understand use cases rather than building AI features in isolation. This ensures AI solves real problems rather than being technology in search of an application.
Strategic Value Creation: The shift from manual processes to AI-enabled automation will fundamentally change how finance teams operate. Rather than spending time on transaction processing and data entry, teams can focus on strategic analysis and value creation—moving from basic bookkeeping to financial strategy and optimization.
Evolution of Work: AI will dramatically increase productivity by automating routine tasks, but this won’t lead to less work. Instead, it enables people to focus on higher-value creative and strategic activities. Leaders can move beyond just creating focus and urgency to identifying where there’s outsized return people’s time, leading to more meaningful work.
Focus on Timeless Problems: The key to building enduring AI companies is focusing on fundamental customer problems rather than chasing the latest technology trends. While AI capabilities are expanding rapidly, successful products must solve challenges that will persist regardless of technological change—like helping businesses operate more efficiently and profitably.
Eric Glyman: For sure. I mean, look, we’re dedicated to making companies more profitable and operate more smoothly. The way you can think about Ramp is we built a command and control system for company finances. So from one place, you can issue cards, manage approvals, make payments of all kinds and even automate closing your books. And so for your finance teams, it means your operations are simpler. You can automate a lot of business processes, and it surfaces up data and intelligence on how your company can spend less. And so the upshot is the average company using Ramp is able to save about five percent per year on their expenses, which is pretty material.
Over the past five years we’ve been in business, this has added into billions of dollars of savings and the equivalent of thousands of years of labor that’s been saved. And so whether it’s large, publicly-traded companies like Shopify, Virgin Voyages, Boys and Girls Club in America, to 25,000 other businesses, it’s bringing benefit today. And a lot of what we’re trying to do is really answer the question of how do you make people more productive with their time and with their money?
What generally makes financial operations a huge time and cost sink is the prevalence of "middle-men" trying to get their extra percentage out of every service. This is why software is such a disruptor—the majority of tasks and payment flows can be either eliminated or automated.
Eric Glyman: Well, so a couple of things, I mean, I would go back to again, like, what is Ramp like? We’re not some AI-driven finance tool that we’re going to market. Do you want to adopt AI in your finance team? No. We exist to save you time and money. We lead with the benefit. We talk about the outcome that we’re trying to drive, and we put these in simple terms.
But I would say it’s actually not possible to use Ramp today without using AI. When people say that it’s so easy to submit expense reports, or that suddenly my books are getting closed faster, it’s often because AI is inserted at lots of different parts throughout the process. And so what I would say is I think one of the first things that we did to try to get at that was focus on what is the problem. We are trying to help businesses operate, you know, using less time, fewer hours and less capital.
And AI was a means to an end, but was not the end. So we didn’t want to have technology in search of a problem, but really focus on what is the problem. Then once you start to decompose the question of, like, what are all the areas that are wasting lots of time, it turns out a lot of time it’s process automation. And so I think it just became, like, the right tool for the job in so many different cases. And I think rather than trying to say, “Would you like to use this tool?” Instead you say, “Would you like to, you know, do fewer expense reports?”
One of the core differences I see in the quality of products that aim to disrupt markets like this is really related to whether they were designed with the goal of solving a problem or they are trying to leverage a specific technology with the hope that it will reduce the pain.
Eric Glyman: And I think that the other thing too is in so many businesses—I know there are a lot of founders listening to this—I think abstract makers away from the problem directly. Which is to say, you know, you can go to a small startup with 10 people, and everyone’s talking to users. And then somehow you go to a company with 500 to 1,000 people, and you try to figure out who’s talked to a customer over the last week—hopefully all the salespeople. But you start talking in marketing and engineering, and people haven’t done it. And what I would argue, look, I think the most important thing beyond just empathy, if you’re trying to make great products, you need to have great taste. You need people who are making to so deeply understand really the experience of building, the pain that people are going through, you know, what they’re actually—you know, the customer at the end is actually doing in order to run your business, that you understand it not just decently, but in some cases better than the customer has. And I think only then can you actually build products that are so well designed that they can actually automate the tasks. They can do it more efficiently.
And I think part of why, you know, as we’re releasing products, engineers are on the call with customers when we ship. They’re accountable for metrics, and how it ultimately performs. And you really won’t find people at Ramp who haven’t talked to customers with any level of recency. And I think that’s just a core part of what makes great product cultures.
One of the standout features of Ramp is its hiring and management culture. There is a very high bar of excellence expected for you to get hired, and it only keeps increasing as you get onboarded.
Eric Glyman: I think it’s been a step function change, for sure, at least as a practitioner in the market, not a researcher. And I think it’s becoming increasingly obvious to us that this is the biggest shift to productivity certainly in my lifetime. And I think it has all sorts of ramifications for builders and people building software. When I think about, like, what are the sources of durability in moats in a lot of software businesses, sometimes it’s there’s more features, there’s more integrations, there’s lock in. You’ve been using my tool for 10 years and it’s really hard to take all your data out.
And I think now today, functionally you can have human-level reasoning, and in some cases superhuman level reasoning available through an API. I think it has profound ramifications for people building businesses. And I think it’s expressed not just in the ability to understand large sets of data and act on it, but it’s a wider variety. I think that there’s—I can say beyond even just the services we’re providing to Ramp, part of how we’ve grown so quickly is we have AI automation and outreach, or we have SDRs that are multiple times more productive than a competitor’s. It’s changed how we do customer service, it’s changed how we do copywriting. We can listen to 100,000 sales calls at once and ask “what did 100,000 people think?” It’s just things that weren’t possible even just a few years ago. And so I think it’s changed really rapidly. And I don’t think most people are really—I think people are experimenting in some cases with ChatGPT, which is great, but I think far too few people have actually started to incorporate into the crevices of how they’re actually working day to day and have felt it. But I think it should accelerate.
I've talked before about AI being an accelerator for the winners. What happens when a company is only focused on hiring top-tier talent and then intentionally tries to improve their performance with advanced tools?
Eric Glyman: Well, first, I mean, part of being a founder and a builder, I think, is just about, like, running this very long-standing and continuous race. I think that great companies are built over many years and decades, and I hope Ramp is the last company that I ever work on. I want to be working on it for a long time. And I think there’s always these questions of what’s changing in the world, and how is that going to reset certain industries. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities, and we can talk about, like, the places to be spending time. But I actually think when you look at Ramp and part of what’s made it work has really been starting with what are the timeless truths that are not going to change whether it’s now or 10 years from now, or a hundred years from now.
I can’t imagine, you know, that 100 years from now people would say, you know, “Like, I wish—” to paraphrase Jeff Bezos—“like, I just wish you would have raised prices on us, Amazon,” or “I wish he would deliver these goods a little bit more slowly.” I think this is very much the case for Ramp. I think people want to, no matter what they’re creating, if you can create great work with less effort, less time, fewer dollars, I think that’s always going to be in style. And so I would say I would start first with being curious about people’s problems in the timeless, who are real customers that could serve, what are real businesses, and what are actual problems that they have now, and what are these problems that are not going to go away? And then I think you start to discover and uncover new technological shifts that can help you solve this in a new and unique, or in some cases, very disruptive way. And so I would say, like, focus on the timeless would be my top advice for this.
Ravi Gupta: Yeah, a friend of mine has this great quote which is, he’s like, “We try to be timeless rather than timely,” because the timely, it just—you know, it evaporates and it’s ephemeral. And I think that the way you all are building Ramp certainly fits with that.
What makes fintech an interesting space today is that there are several founders who are spending a lot of time not only executing, but deeply thinking about the evolution of their company culture and its broader impact. I wrote previously about Stripe, but Ramp is in itself an interesting example. At its core, it's not really only fitting in a "fintech-shaped box", but rather it's also a productivity product.
Let's see whether this story actually plays out from the perspective of the people in the trenches:
Source: RepVue
The sales teams are currently reporting a quota attainment of 66%.
Source: TeamBlind
The intensity portrayed by the CEO clearly is reflected in the engineering org.
Source: Eric Glyman on X
Eric Glyman: In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took the time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team. Support is not a cost to minimize, it’s a key function every company should take seriously. When you listen to customers and make your product intuitive, you get output graphs like the below – where the rate of active user growth far exceeds the rate of support tickets.
To this day, almost a decade later, support reports into product at Ramp
How companies think about support is probably one of the fastest ways to qualify what their long-term projection will be. One of the important companies in cloud infrastructure software used to have the VP of Support work directly for the CEO and communicate every single week a list of critical tickets, customer feedback, and how they were solved to the whole company.
Once that VP left, the team ended up moving under the sales org, but ironically this did not result in improved communication lines—if anything, not having Support sit as its own org next to Product and Sales essentially handicapped its role of advocating for the customers in either direction.
Eric Glyman: We got here by taking Charlie Munger’s quote to heart: “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” Our simple idea: Save every business time and money. In less than 6 years since we incorporated, we’ve saved businesses $2B+ and 20M+ hours—over half in the past 12 months alone.
Source: Ramp
Ramp is a strong recommendation, and they are hiring in a variety of GTM roles. While not a pure cloud infrastructure software player, their heavy reliance on AI makes them a great example of what a modern company enabled by our tech stack can achieve.
