Lessons from Eric Glyman, founder and CEO of Ramp

On Startups & Entrepreneurship

"I think the first-time founder mindset is very scarcity-focused. Because you've never done it. I was just always terrified and thinking, 'we're months away from running out of cash. We need to do everything by hand.' So I would say one of the biggest differences as a second-time founder is getting over that mindset." [1]
"Once you've really found product-market fit, it's being able to lean into that growth and planning out phases ahead." [1]
"If you're doing something truly contrarian you can almost guarantee it's the first, consistent, and most challenging moment you'll face. It kills most ideas before they can blossom into something bigger." [2]
"Funding rounds should be thought of as science experiments. What do you need to prove with the limited amount of capital you have on hand to unlock the next stage of funding and growth?" [1]
"I think that if you want to have different than average outcomes, you can't behave in an average way." [3]
"Most startups, the only strategy is just execution for a while." [3]
"I think there's very few products that exist in a vacuum. So first I would try to identify what's around you and how is your product interacting where either, you actually can do that next job better, or if you're solving this workflow, going wider actually helps in that workflow." [1]
"Take the long view. Your goal is to maximize your ultimate enterprise value, not the value of a single round." [1]
"We were much more intentional about really trying to understand the market, what made the business work, and how it connects to strategy." [4]
"Great companies are built over many years and decades, and I hope Ramp is the last company that I ever work on." [1]

On Finance & Business Strategy

"We wanted to achieve a message-market fit. If you could build the thing, and it actually worked, would people care about it? Is there some unique message that if you launched, people would actually say, 'I want to try this, this elevator pitch works on me.'" [1]
"We're not in the business of slinging cards... our mission is to help companies spend less money and spend less time." [3]
"When it comes to core foundational building blocks, take the time to get them right. For all other issues, what matters most is iterating fast instead of proving things right." [1]
"I've always been interested in how great leaders run their businesses. And one clear theme is they're all disciplined operators and manage their costs like a hawk." [2]
"My role in financial restructuring showed me that even once great businesses - if they did not apply rigor to how their teams spent time and money - could go bankrupt." [2]
"We believe too few CFOs are thinking about improving the architecture of the financial and operational systems they use." [2]
"The rule at Ramp is everything we do, every service we offer, every product that we put out into the market has to meet one test, which is does this save time or money for customers? If it does, we can ship it. If it doesn't, we don't." [6]

On AI & Technology

"The ultimate view I have here is that AI will usher in a new phase of 'self-driving money.' What I mean by that is many tasks that need to be done manually right now will happen without you even asking." [2]
"The best AI is invisible AI. Our agents chase receipts, auto-fill expense reports and forecast cash flow so humans can focus on building things that matter." [7]
"We used to train people to think like software. Now it's time for software to think like people: your sharpest controllers, procurement leaders, treasury experts." [8]
"AI's ability to automate these functions means that employees can spend more time innovating, strategizing, and solving complex problems rather than managing logistics." [10]
"This isn't a story about replacing people. It's about redeploying them – up the value chain, into the work only humans can do." [8]
"Business leaders must move beyond viewing AI as a futuristic experiment and start treating it as a core part of their operational strategy." [10]
"I think that AI is in and what's happened over the past year represents the biggest shift to productivity, certainly in my lifetime." [11]
"If you have to do a lot of education to get customers to know how to use your product, you're not creating a great product." [7]

On Leadership & Team Building

"I think any company at its core, especially technology companies, they're not in the technology business, they are in the people business. The team you build is the company that you build." [6]
"I spend about 35 to 40 percent of my time on hiring and thinking about performance management." [1]
"In a way, everyone is the hero of their own story. They're trying to grow, whether you're a founder or a member of a team." [1]
"You're not just hiring that one person. You're hiring all the people that either they will bring in or that they'll inspire to come to the company." [12]
"We very, very rarely hire managers directly to go into the company. We prefer finding people who have done the work." [6]
"You should look for people who are great at their craft, but often people forget this." [6]
"Look for slope over intercept. Every time." [6]
"A lot of culture is just really what you're about, what you do." [12]
"It is my job to keep them interested and to keep the company interesting for them to continuously see these challenges and and be attracted to them." [13]
"I think it's more important to find people with extraordinary taste... what is going to connect with people emotionally." [11]

On Ramp's Mission & Vision

"Our mission at Ramp is to help all tens of thousands of customers now get more of every dollar and every hour." [1]
"They didn't start their companies to manage expenses or do accounting. They're trying to achieve their missions. And our goal is to be a multiplier on their most finite resources." [4]
"At Ramp, our singular focus on helping companies spend less guides our decisions and priorities every day." [1]
"We're not trying to make easier to do with fewer step expense reports, we're trying to have expenses that do themselves." [6]
"The core underlying principle out of this is trust. Our customers need to trust us too." [3]
"By starting by trying to align our incentives with customers, actually the business model that gets better, the more money and time we save you, the more we think and hope and believe customers will want to use Ramp." [3]

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