Eric Glyman, co-founder of Ramp (now valued at ~$20B), tells the story of setting a goal to build a billion-dollar company in 18 months and reverse-engineering it. He explains Ramp’s explosive growth from $0 to $100M ARR in 15-17 months, walks through the history of credit cards from AP Giannini to Bank of America’s mass mail campaign, and discusses why velocity had to be built into the company’s DNA from day one.
Speakers: Eric Glyman (co-founder, Ramp), Sam Parr (host)
The Billion-Dollar Goal [00:00:00]
Sam: You said something pretty crazy. “I want to build a billion-dollar company in 18 months.”
Eric: In 18 months. Yeah.
Sam: That’s crazy fast. Is that really what happened? You and Kareem had that conversation?
Eric: Yeah, that’s a real conversation. We wanted to go fast. The world was moving faster than ever. We had already sold our first company — Parabus — and we were comfortable. We’d left very good setups. I was a 26-year-old senior director at Capital One — I think the youngest person at that level. We knew that if we were going to leave, we either wanted to make the company huge quickly or fail really quickly.
So yeah, Kareem really did have that conversation. He had it with Calvin. I think when we finally did become a billion-dollar company — in 2021, less than two years from incorporation — Calvin said, “Look, it’s best not to know the odds. If I had looked it up and known, I would have seen there was no company in New York’s history that was worth a billion dollars within 18 months, or two years, or even three.”
Sam: What was your revenue when that happened?
Eric: We incorporated in March 2019. We launched publicly in February 2020. The pandemic hit, things slowed down, and then Ramp just started really accelerating. That year revenue grew something like 70 times year-over-year. We were approaching $10 million a year before the company had been out for even a year. By the end of 2021, the company had an $8.1 billion valuation and we were coming up on — but hadn’t yet crossed — $100 million a year in revenue.
Sam: How many months to $100 million run rate?
Eric: We were one of the fastest ever. I think we hit our first million run rate sometime in the spring of 2020, maybe by early summer. So from a million to $100 million in revenue — I want to say 15 to 17 months. It was explosive.
How the Credit Card Business Model Works [00:08:00]
Sam: I don’t even know how your business model works other than that I use it. You take a percentage of spend, I imagine?
Eric: I didn’t know anything about it either until I sold my last company to Capital One and learned the business. In financial services, particularly in the card space, there are basically two ways credit cards make money.
Number one is a transaction-based model called interchange. Every time a card is swiped, there’s a series of payments. The merchant gets the lion’s share. Then the folks involved in moving the money take a little bit — the merchant processor, the network (Visa or Mastercard), the issuer processor, and the issuer. The issuer — the name on your card — traditionally keeps most of the interchange, because they’re taking on the credit risk. They’re saying: “Merchant, we will pay you even if our customer doesn’t pay us back.”
Historically these rates were very high — as much as 5 or 6% going back to old department store credit in the early 1900s.
Sam: 18 months in, at $100 million in revenue — how many employees?
Eric: Somewhere between 100 and 200.
Sam: That boggles my mind. My company is two years old, we’re bootstrapped, and we have 15 or 18 people. Just the logistics of getting 10 people a month — does everyone have a computer? That’s incredibly challenging.
Eric: Now we’re over 1,100 people. There can be two-week periods when 40 to 50 people start. You definitely need great software. That’s actually a whole class of tools that tend to be great business models — Ramp in the card space, Rippling in HR, HubSpot for sales. These take what used to be painful one-offs and abstract them away.
Designing for Velocity [00:16:00]
Eric: We designed the company explicitly around velocity from day one. If you step back and look at the industry we’re playing in — most of the founders of the companies we compete with literally wore top hats. James Pierpont Morgan, Henry Wells, the founders of Amex, Citi, Chase — these are incredible businesses, but they move very slowly.
An analogy I like: imagine you wake up and you have to use the cell phone technology your parents used when they were your age. You couldn’t do this podcast. You couldn’t run your business. But if you woke up and had to use their bank account or credit card, you probably could. Not too bad. That’s proof that not much innovation has happened in financial services in 30 or 40 years.
So our view early on was: count the days, move at incredible velocity, and be designed to ship things faster. Today we’re 2,310 days old.
In the early days, we were hellbent on: within 45 days, approved by the network. Within 60, approved by our bank. Within 70, funding our first transactions. Getting the product in front of customers as fast as possible. We set goals to grow 10% a week.
Sam: You don’t have the typical personality type. Usually people who succeed this fast score very high on disagreeableness. You seem pretty easy to get along with and very calm.
Eric: My view is I’m not trying to find people who are low-cost, push them to an extreme, burn them out. I’d rather find people who find extreme joy in their craft and set them up to do just that as much as possible. But to move quickly, you can’t do everything. There’s only one or two things you can pick, and you need extreme focus on that.
Ideas Before Ramp: Manufactured Homes [00:24:00]
Sam: What businesses were you going to start instead of Ramp? You’d just sold Parabus for mid-eight figures — enough to be comfortable. You’re at Capital One. What was the list?
Eric: The first year we basically didn’t spend too much time at all. We wanted to make sure the people we sold to felt great about the deal. Integrity matters — the world is small, and you want a reputation where everyone wins.
By the second year I was like, I miss the speed. I’m at a cruise ship versus a small speedboat. So I started coming up with ideas in the abstract, and we went on a journey of bad ideas until eventually getting back to good ones.
One was manufactured homes. We were looking at apartments in New York wondering why they were all kind of bad. Cars are manufactured, planes are manufactured — why aren’t homes? I’d grown up with friends and grandparents who lived in mobile homes delivered on trucks. Japan has this figured out — most of their home builders are manufacturers, and a new home build isn’t crazy expensive.
We went down the rabbit hole, but ultimately decided not to do it. One: I had no business in it. I rented an apartment, never owned a home, never manufactured anything. Two: the more we read, the constraint wasn’t manufacturing at all. It was zoning. You could manufacture a house that was zoned to go nowhere. How do you actually go and change that? It shows up in funny ways — which way does the house face, how far back does it have to be set, what are the proportions.
Sam: Joe Gebbia is doing something in this space.
Eric: I think if people crack this, it’s an enormous opportunity. But it’s a big slog — you’re not going to 10x for a while. You’re going to be 10-20% compound for a long time. There’s a great business to be built there. It’s just too slow for where we were.
The Co-Brand Card Idea [00:32:00]
Eric: The other variant we explored was in the co-brand card space. At checkout, a store says, “Would you like to open a Best Buy credit card?” Someone is powering those businesses — Synchrony, Capital One, Amex, all the large banks. These are tens-of-billions-of-dollar businesses.
At Parabus we worked closely with retailers. These stores have strong customer loyalty, and credit cards are great products but very hard to sell. The basic model: if you can convert even a tiny percentage of loyal customers to take on a credit card, you make a little interchange, lower your costs when they’re shopping with you, and make a bit at all the other places they shop.
We thought there was a chance to have a modern card for businesses and creators. Shopify was opening up new retailers everywhere. Creators were getting big. But these take a long time — even the fastest ever, you’re building for many, many years.
What got me is that the largest credit card companies were working really hard to get customers to spend a little bit more than they thought — and then working hard to convince people the points they got were worth a lot while devaluing them in the background. I thought that was crazy.
The History of Credit Cards [00:40:00]
Sam: Did you learn anything about the weird or shady history of the banking industry?
Eric: It started with a guy named AP Giannini. Bank of Italy — basically Bank of America — started by a poor Italian immigrant. His first big opportunity was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Fires everywhere, huge portions of the city burned down. He set up a table on Market Street and started making loans then and there on the spot, and went from a tiny bank to something enormous.
He pioneered franchise banking — little branches in all sorts of cities, lending to small businesses and the emerging middle class. Banks would actually go into department stores, and instead of Macy’s giving you a loan to buy a washing machine, the bank would say, “Macy’s, you don’t need to underwrite each customer. We’ll do that for you.”
By the 1950s, Bank of America was the biggest bank in the US, maybe the world. In a town where maybe 60-70% of everybody was already a customer, they took a bet: let’s just get everybody. They mailed the entire town a four-or-five-digit card. You could go use it anywhere and say “put it on my card” and pay the bank back later.
It exploded. People with access to credit could afford more things. It was good for merchants too — they could compete with the big department stores. And that Bank of America card became a franchise model: Bank of America would run the program for regional banks, issuing Bank of America cards to their customers while handling operations, underwriting, and collections.
Sam: Is credit a uniquely American thing?
Eric: There’s a good argument for yes. In Europe, even today, you see very different behavior — they put way more down when they buy a home. In Europe, if you’re rich you can borrow; if you’re not, you pay cash. In the US, it’s this view that you can pick yourself up by your bootstraps — borrow for that car, for that farm equipment, for that laundry machine so you can build your business. There’s a lot of good that comes with that, and sometimes bad. But on net, startup costs are real, and once you get going, you can build an extraordinary business.
The Physics of Compounding [00:52:00]
Sam: I’m fascinated with building a company that can last 50, 100, 200 years — something where, God willing, my children might want to get involved and it lasts beyond me. Those businesses are typically not the fastest-growing ones.
Eric: I actually agree with the underlying point. What makes great businesses isn’t who grew 200% this year. It’s which businesses can grow 30% for 30 years. If you do that, you will be a giant business.
Sam: That’s not what you did.
Eric: Our view is that we can. We’ve grown extraordinarily quickly, and we’re still about doubling each year at enormous scale. We’re about 1.5% of the corporate and small business card market in the US. If you just look at the physics — even if we massively decelerate and start growing 30% for decades — it’s physically possible. The market is so big.
These old banking families — they’re focused on doing simple things well for a very, very long time. They just don’t sell, don’t fight, don’t interrupt the power of compounding. When things get risky, most people sell. But a lot of these families just stayed in, focused on the business.
You want to find a business where you can just compound for a long time.