Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Eric, our CEO, has publicly talked about this. I think we as a company are very thoughtful about what we build in-house versus what we buy externally. I think a lot of engineering teams are often excited about building things in-house where there's off the shelf products that could basically work externally. And Ramp has historically been good at not falling into that trap. And we use third party tools for a lot of our growth and experimentation for things that are not proprietary, strategic, et cetera, obviously. Some of the automation stuff that we've talked about, we've built all of that in-house in terms of prospecting, lead scoring, and how we talk to our customers. But for the most part, we use external tools. Instacart and Opendoor were not like that. We built our own internal experiment tracking systems, A/B testing frameworks and all of that in-house. That's what I would've guessed about Ramp that it's with speed, you got to not build stuff you don't have to build. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Maybe one last topic to talk about. I want to talk about hiring. You have some really interesting approaches to how to think about hiring. One is I think you have a really interesting strategy for how to find the best companies and also the best people at each of those companies to go after if you're hiring for specific role. Can you talk about how you think about that? Gokul on Twitter has talked about some of those, which is there's two ways to go about hiring great people. One way is basically a very thoughtful and tactical network search where let's say you're hiring for a head of SEO, you go ask your network of who is the best SEO person you know, get introduction to each of those folks, and then ask them who the best person that they know is. And you have a mapping of where are the best SEO teams and why. If you can't get one of those people, 20, 30 people on your target list, you go down the list of, okay, what is the next best person? And you typically want to limit it to companies that are one to two stages of growth after you. So you want somebody that has seen your stage of growth and beyond at a company that has a reputation for craft and the field that you're looking for. So that's a very classic way of doing that, and I think that works really well for people and companies that are really well-connected. So there's another approach that I've actually used successfully is much more kind of data driven and external and not as network based, which is you can often look up data. [inaudible 01:02:14] is a lot of it is somewhat public, right? So you can look up information on which companies might be doing well. So for example, I'll just pick like if you're looking for great email marketing folks like CRM marketing lead or something like that, you can actually look up on similar web, what percentage of traffic shows up via email to companies websites. So you've got your target list of companies that are one or two stage beyond you that you respect as general companies. And you can go and see, okay, which ones of these are actually really effective at driving web traffic or app traffic or app downloads via their email. And then go try to source from those teams and companies. And I think people under-utilize that even though it's very intuitive, it's just not something that occurs to people to do.…

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