Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445]
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The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere. Brilliant people getting buried in expense management busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work. Modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
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you today? It's very exciting. But even when you are describing us as no longer an upstart, I still haven't internalized this, to be honest with you. The most exciting aspect of being a startup is that you get to grow very fast, make decisions quickly, and move quickly. So we are trying to maintain that as much as we can. And we do this by essentially breaking up all the different problems we're trying to go after and give small teams full autonomy over these problems. So every time I spent some time with a small part of the company, it does feel like they have full autonomy over the problem t
a favorite example of that so far that you've actually deployed in this work?
Yeah, of course. I'd say the the most obvious one is what we call internally the policy agents. So most companies have a travel expense management policy. It's generally a document. Sometimes it's well written and clear and sometimes it's not, but that's essentially a document that you write to drive the behaviors of people in the company and how they manage their expenses. In the old world, people make transactions, and before they make the transaction sometimes they'll go and check the expense report, sometimes they try to remember it from memory, they'll make a transaction, they'll file an
I was with an old friend last week who was in town for I think Visa had some sort of big conference in New York last week. And all the various players from your competitors and people in your industry were there. And he told me that he had no affiliation with you or with me, that everyone there was bitching about Ramp taking all their customers. And I'm curious what you think the most common reasons are for that. When you're beating whoever it is, what are the most common attribution reasons when you study why a given customer is picking you over somebody else? Because it seems a little bit li
I still go back to the early days and why a lot of people even picked us when we didn't have that much credibility o
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