How Ramp’s Eric Glyman went from “a sheet of paper” to a 13,000+ customer fintech business in less than four years
The fintech entrepreneur and angel investor Eric Glyman says it was a revelation to realize that for his clients, saving time was just as important as saving money. “Our job is turning data into savings,” he says, a practice he started with his consumer-facing business Paribus and continued with the founding of Ramp in 2019.
Currently, Ramp is among the fastest-growing software businesses catering to corporate expense and card management. But Glyman didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur. He started Paribus out of a desire to save money on flights before it was acquired by Capital One in 2016.
Following the acquisition, Glyman and his co-founder Karim Atiyeh stayed on with Capital One for a few years to help with the transition. Both left in 2019 to start Ramp with Gene Lee, another longtime friend. Just four years later Ramp has garnered over $1.5 billion in venture capital from funds including Stripe and Founders Fund. The company, which offers corporate credit cards through a partnership with Visa as well as accounting automation and expense management, now claims over 13,000 customers and 400 employees. He says it processes over a billion dollars in transactions every month.
“No one needs another credit card,” says Glyman. “But you might be able to build great software that automates expense management, which helps people figure out when they’re getting charged more than other places are.”
Glyman joined Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Quicktake host, at Bloomberg’s Global Headquarters in New York City on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 for a conversation as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. He shared his thoughts on the future of AI, what it’s been like to run a business that went from “a sheet of paper in an apartment” to a 13,000+ client company in less than four years, and his decade-long relationship with Atiyeh, his co-founder: “When you go through the hard times, you understand each other better,” he says, “and can learn what makes one another great.”
Watch the full discussion:
Gravitating towards scale
Glyman says he was always curious about businesses and metropolises that scaled quickly, a fascination he credits with his upbringing in Las Vegas, which in the first 18 years of his life grew from a relatively sleepy town to a global city with a population of 2 million. As the founder was starting college at Harvard in 2008, he says, China was emerging as the latest large economy to note. He majored in economics with a minor in East Asian studies, learning Mandarin and spending a total of two years in China, some of it studying abroad at Peking University in Beijing.
“The world is always under construction,” he says, but most parts of the globe weren’t exploding like China was during that time. He’d leave Beijing for short periods and return to find new skyscrapers or entirely reconstructed parts of town. “You almost wouldn’t recognize the place,” he says.
It was instructive to spend a year immersed in a completely different culture, but Glyman also credits his time in China with instilling a sense of the value of exponential growth. Later, on the East Coast of the U.S., he was surprised to find people settling for the landscape in front of them instead of thinking, “How do I work on that?”
Glyman in conversation with Scarlet Fu of Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Quicktake
Building fintech services that “proactively had your back”
The basic premise behind Paribus, which Glyman co-founded with Karim Atiyeh in 2014, was that it should be easier for the average consumer to find and take advantage of a good retroactive deal. As a teenager Glyman worked at the clothing store Express and marveled at how a dress shirt could be marked 20% off on a Tuesday and 50% off the next day. He also recalls his frustration, years before founding Paribus, with trying to buy discounted plane tickets for himself and some friends. The day after purchasing what they thought were fairly cheap tickets from a major airline, the group sent the same deal to a friend only to find the same airfare had dropped about $100 overnight. At the time, Glyman was working in banking. He was pretty accustomed to reading documents, so he looked at the fine print and got the price difference back for his friends.
“What’s everyone else doing?” he remembers wondering. “I wish there was some software that could track this sort of thing.” Eventually Paribus would automate the process, finding rebates for customers when the price of a service had dropped and quickly filing refunds to recoup what they’d been charged. The company took off, coinciding with the trend of massive retailers like Amazon changing their prices “about 500,000 times a day,” says Glyman. After just a few years of operation Capital One expressed interest in Paribus. It fit into the credit card company’s burgeoning strategy, according to Glyman, of building credit cards that went beyond fraud notifications and “proactively had your back.” After some initial back-and-forth, Paribus merged with Capital One and became Capital One Shopping, where the pair built software for the company’s cardholders for the next three years.
A credit card that wants you to spend less
By March of 2019, Glyman and Atiyeh had left Capital One and incorporated their new business. “We had this idea of, ‘What if your credit card could help your business spend less money?’” says Glyman. The pair sat down with around 100 finance experts and entrepreneurs before they launched their first card. But what they found was that even more than money, potential clients wanted to save time: There were all sorts of inefficiencies in how companies were compiling receipts and logging expenses that required different tools and software. They thought they could streamline the process and tailor corporate cards to give the kinds of perks companies actually wanted.
The pandemic, he adds, was a particularly interesting time, considering that the lounge access or travel points traditional credit cards offered suddenly didn’t matter nearly as much. What customers wanted was cash back and more time, two things Ramp was particularly well-suited to provide.
“We’re interested in leveraging data to help people keep their books more effectively,” Glyman says. To illustrate the point, he uses the example of Waze. In the past, a person embarking on a trip might use something like Yahoo’s MapQuest to find the shortest route between point A and point B. But with a company like Waze, a user can get real-time data on traffic jams that will get them there faster. Part of Ramp’s utility for a client, he says, is in its ability to compare rates for common business software automatically or algorithmically tag expenses — major time-savers at scale.
“We move money, but fundamentally we’re a workflow company,” says Glyman, and AI has the ability to streamline some of the more tedious tasks a company’s financial manager might take on. He compares the process within Ramp to an AI translating between English and Mandarin. Functionally, he says, the company is translating everyday transactions and sales memos into actionable insights. “I think there’s potential in recognizing patterns at scale,” he says.
This article was originally published by Tech at Bloomberg.
