Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
hardware / uses
“And then maybe another one is Fellow coffee, their kettles I think just designed so beautifully. I don't drink coffee, I drink tea, but I use my Fellow kettle for tea, and I think it's just a delightful product to use.”
tool / uses
“A couple of things that we've used, I mean, one simple thing is for sprint planning, actually, we use Airtable because the planning process and the scoring is so much more analytical and the translation layer.”
book / likes
“I tend to find most business books can be decks, but one that I really like actually is Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss.”
book / recommends
“I tend to find most business books can be decks, but one that I really like actually is Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss. It's a negotiation book, find it super helpful for negotiation, but also for a lot of business decision making generally, to be honest, and life. And then I'm a big fan of sci-fi short stories, so anything by Ted Chiang or Ken Liu, I highly recommend.”
Claim ledger
20 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“I tend to find most business books can be decks, but one that I really like actually is Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss. It's a negotiation book, find it super helpful for negotiation, but also for a lot of business decision making generally, to be honest, and life. And then I'm a big fan of sci-fi short stories, so anything by Ted Chiang or Ken Liu, I highly recommend.”
02 / recommendation
“I tend to find most business books can be decks, but one that I really like actually is Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss.”
03 / belief
“I'm a big believer in, and Geoff talks about this too in your other interview, hiring based on slope rather than intercept, I think will work well for you and only hiring when people and teams are really stretched.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don't know if there's been others since, but certainly not in the FinTech category as far as I know.”
05 / belief
“The movie can also be, I think, everything because there are just so many different reads that you can get about that.”
06 / belief
“My view is you start off with founder-led sales, the early team needs to know how to actually sell.”
07 / belief
“You can see the cycle time thing in terms of responsiveness from everybody at Ramp and I think typically what you tend to see is as companies get bigger, they evolve off of Slack to email and everything just moves a little bit slower and there's process and then there's obviously a lot of good parts of that but Ramp, what I noticed when I joined and true to this day is 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.”
08 / belief
“For engagement, I've often found what really helps is, and you've done actually really good benchmarking at some point, the escape velocity metric for growth for a company, I think.”
09 / belief
“On volume, I think the right success metric has a couple things that are important.”
10 / belief
“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 that is cross-channel, cross-team.”
11 / evaluation
“I think channels like these are one piece of the equation, but I think traditional PR will remain another really important piece because they just target a different audience.”
12 / evaluation
“" There's a fundamental flaw to it which obviously is that you're focusing on cost and not the value derived. And so when you focus on CAC and reducing CAC, what tends to happen is you actually might be doing something very damaging where you're succeeding in reducing CAC, but you're actually bringing in customers that are less valuable because those are the ones that you're able to attract with a lower CAC.”
13 / recommendation
“A couple of things that we've used, I mean, one simple thing is for sprint planning, actually, we use Airtable because the planning process and the scoring is so much more analytical and the translation layer.”
14 / evaluation
“One thing that's interesting about the world of growth today is I think historically people that used to run growth were folks that had a marketing or a product background. And what you're seeing these days I think are more folks like me who actually come from an investor and 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.”
15 / evaluation
“Rather than going into the 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 then you compare it against industry benchmarks, I think the secret sauce of Ramp is not that we've found a channel that's unique and that we've over-invested or under-invested.”
16 / evaluation
“Certainly we have a fantastic group of very sophisticated investors 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 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.”
17 / evaluation
“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.”
18 / preference
“Yeah. And it is very similar to, we used to have this at Opendoor, and I think DoorDash also uses a similar framework, which is speed, quality, and cost.”
19 / recommendation
“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.”
20 / recommendation
“And then maybe another one is Fellow coffee, their kettles I think just designed so beautifully. I don't drink coffee, I drink tea, but I use my Fellow kettle for tea, and I think it's just a delightful product to use.”