Ramp cofounder and CEO Eric Glyman had Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell doing a double take.
“You hit on this aspect of speed; we‘re religious about it,” Glyman said during an onstage interview at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah. “We count the days: We’re 2,367 days old.”
“You know exactly how many days old Ramp is?” Shontell asked incredulously.
“We do,” said Glyman. At Ramp, he explained, “we want to instill that urgency to say, ‘Today is the only 2,367 we’re going to have. We’re going to make it count.’”
Indeed, Ramp has become synonymous in the startup community with fast growth. Within two years of its birth in 2019, the fintech startup had secured a $1 billion valuation. Within three years, it had surpassed $100 million in annual revenue. And six years since its founding, Ramp reached a $1 billion annual revenue run rate and a $22.5 billion valuation.
Glyman, who cites former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s book, Amp It Up as an influence, said stagnating organizations have a mindset where, at the end of the week, it’s easy to put a task off until Monday. What fast-moving companies need is the urgency to get it done on Friday, he said—which requires that “someone is driving and leaders are creating tempo.”
And it’s not just urgency for urgency’s sake, the Ramp CEO added: Internal tracking of results and progress over short time frames ensures the work is having real impact. Looking back over 30 days of work, for example, helps leaders make tradeoffs and identify which work “really mattered and moved us forward” so they can double down on that and shelve the other stuff that didn’t, even if it was work that seemed useful. All in the name of moving faster.
That kind of thinking has helped spur Ramp’s explosive growth as it expanded its product offering , Fortune’s Leo Schwartz wrote in a feature about Ramp this month. At launch, Ramp focused on reinventing the $2 trillion corporate and small-business credit card space, which American Express dominates, owning about a third of the sector. “Competing with expense-report software like Concur and Expensify wasn’t in Ramp’s initial business plan, but the young team quickly realized that it was the natural next step,” Schwartz wrote. “Rather than integrating their cards with another platform, why not build the software themselves?”
The tool, launched in February 2020, seamlessly integrates the corporate credit card with the expense reporting system: “When an employee swipes their Ramp credit card, either the expense is automatically processed from transaction data that Ramp collects, or the employee gets a text asking for a receipt. Goodbye, expense reports.”
And the quick move into an adjacent market paid off handsomely, Schwartz wrote: “If credit cards were the wedge for Ramp, expense reports were the mousetrap—the product that convinced customers to stick around.”
Now, for the next 2,367 days …
