Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445]
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
In this episode, Karim Ortia, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, shares his framework for building "self-driving finance" using AI agents to automate expense management, invoice processing, and financial workflows. (05:00) Ramp has reached over a billion dollars in revenue in just five years by focusing relentlessly on eliminating bureaucratic waste and giving finance teams their time back to focus on strategic work. (09:09)
- Main theme: The conversation explores how technical founders can dominate the AI era by programming AI as their actual product, moving beyond using AI as a productivity tool to building intelligent agents that understand context better than humans and improve continuously.
Speakers
Karim Ortia
Karim is the co-founder and CTO of Ramp, the fastest growing finance automation platform in history, reaching over a billion dollars in revenue in just over five years. Previously, he co-founded Paribus, a consumer price-tracking platform that was acquired by Capital One, where he spent two years growing the product (now Capital One Shopping). Karim grew up in Lebanon during a relatively peaceful period following the civil war, which instilled in him a deep understanding of external risk and the importance of moving quickly when opportunities arise.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick is the CEO of Positive Sum and host of the Invest Like the Best podcast. He leads Colossus, a platform focused on in-depth business and investing content, and has built relationships with many of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors of this generation.
Key Takeaways
Move from AI as productivity tool to AI as your product
Karim explains that most companies are still in the early phase of using AI to do the same work faster, like developers using ChatGPT to write code snippets. (09:09) The transformative phase involves programming AI agents as your actual product. At Ramp, they've built policy agents that have more context about transactions than human reviewers - integrated with calendars, emails, and expense policies to enforce rules 24/7. This represents a fundamental shift from deterministic code to living, breathing text documents that guide intelligent agents with access to real-time data.
Obsess over consumer-grade user experience in business software
Traditional business software was built for decision makers, not users, creating products that solve one person's problem while giving everyone else daily paper cuts. (13:51) Ramp differentiated by building Instagram-quality user experience for business software, constantly asking "How can we figure out the answer ourselves without asking the customer?" and "Why can't we do this for them instead of telling them to do it?" This obsession with minimizing time spent in their app became their core competitive advantage.
Build systems that break predictably rather than systems that never break
From Paribus, Karim learned to build quickly with the assumption that things will break, focusing on speed of recovery rather than prevention. (35:29) At Ramp, they split their engineering along this boundary - anything touching money movement and risk must be built to never break, while features like receipt matching and user interface elements should iterate rapidly and break predictably. This allows for relentless innovation in low-risk areas while maintaining absolute reliability in critical systems.
Hire for spikiness rather than well-rounded candidates
Instead of looking for people who check boxes on ten different things, focus on assembling "the Avengers" where everyone has a clear superpower. (48:23) Karim looks for extreme talent in specific areas, often hiring people earlier in their careers (freshmen vs juniors) and focusing on those who have excelled in the hardest classes or most competitive programs. The key is interviewing candidates specifically on what they claim to be excellent at - they better be significantly more knowledgeable than you after a couple hours of research.
Speed trumps process - shorten the cycle between idea and customer feedback
The most tactical advice for increasing company velocity is shortening the time between having an idea and putting it in front of customers. (89:59) Avoid measuring how long tasks will take in advance, as this often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that slows teams down. Instead, focus on eliminating dependencies and bureaucratic overhead. When Karim took over marketing, he reduced creative asset production from two weeks to ten minutes by removing the briefing process and giving teams direct access to AI-powered brand-compliant tools.
Statistics & Facts
- Ramp reached over a billion dollars in revenue in just over five years, making it one of the fastest growing finance automation platforms in history. (05:07)
- The addressable market for business expense management and financial workflows is over 100 billion dollars per year in the US alone. (23:32)
- At Paribus, they were processing billions of emails per day and tens of millions of receipts per day, running one of the largest scraping operations in the US at the time. (34:44)