Just think of how many cans of coconut water I could have bought instead of renting this.

Ramp went from $0 to $1B in revenue in 6 years. Deep-dived into 8 growth mechanics behind this $44B compounding machine that wins by "helping companies spend less"👇: @eglyman and @karimatiyeh sold their first company to @CapitalOne in 2016 (Paribus = a tool that found you refunds on stuff you'd already bought). In 2019 they took the same idea to corporate cards, and now Capital One has bought their biggest rival (pretty poetic). The market is a bit of a graveyard with Brex peaking at $12.3B then sold for $5.15B, Navan IPOing below its private mark and Divvy bought by Bill. Meanwhile @tryramp compounded to $44B (with its trade-offs, also covered below) The 8 growth mechanics I found most interesting after deep-diving into 20 founders interviews research: 1. Promised to cut your bill (flipped incentives): cards earn a fee per swipe so every card wants you spending more (that's what points are for). They pitched the opposite with a 1.5% flat cashback software that "finds waste", so CFOs trusted the card that wasn't profiting off their waste tend to move their whole spend over (nice). 2. Made the software "free" initially: Expensify or Concur charge per seat, ramp gives the same suite away because the swipe fee pays for it, so companies sign up with zero budget approval (hard to compete against). 3. Every new product recruits customers: thousands of companies came in through free bill pay or travel (aka never touched the card), each launch is a new acquisition channel (half of customers now use 2 products). 4. Shipped faster: $100M in revenue with fewer than 50 engineers and 5 PMs. Apparently one team built a Bill(.)com rival in 3 months (pre-vibe coding). Interesting product culture, @lennysan has a great deep-dive on this with @geoffintech from 2023. 5. Repriced to keep growing: cut their valuation 28% to $5.8B in 2023 while revenue 3x'd which let them keep raising hiring. Meanwhile brex defended $12.3B for 3 years and sold for $5.15B. 6. Hunted underpriced attention: a few examples of this in the playbook but direct mail for example looked like junk so nobody competed for the mailbox, which made it dirt cheap to test and ended up becoming one of their biggest channels. 7. Claimed a new spend category first: tokens are a fast-growing cost invisible to most finance tools for now and they moved first to build the tracker before the it had a proper name. 8. Turn data into free(ish) distribution: you've likely seen some of the great data produced by @arakharazianthey from their Economics Lab, they sit on real-time spend data from 50K businesses and publish it free every month, so it gets quoted a lot, great valuable loop. Read the full deep-dive trade-offs, in my bio (@IvanLandabaso) or below 👇:

Always check your DMs

Can I couch surf in the Gundo next week?

I have coconut water you know what that means

Undisclosed @astonmartin

You’re always just a DM away from watching Leclerc crash out on the big screen.

A San Francisco Grand Prix would be incredible.

The @cantos thesis is basically: "Inconvenient truths" My & @ameekapadia's text thread with Jake is at least 10% "YOU ORDERED WHAT?!?"

lol you just started the next thread. GP horror stories of dealing with bad LPs

Shooting planes today

WE ARE FINALLY MAKING IT HAPPEN

My favorite comments on the FF Mafia video are all the people saying “why not Werewolf, Blood on the Clocktower, etc”. Dudes. Just let it be what it is. Do you watch the NBA Finals and say “you know, this would be better if they played with a football instead”?

Neros: 2,400 Ten other companies combined: 560

FF is about to start clipping a game show and it's going to RIP on X

Rented a movie theater to watch the Monaco GP on Sunday. Super fans only :)

coming soon

Where are my Formula One friends at?