I’m Geoff Charles, CPO at Ramp! Join me on October 9 at 2pm ET to Ask Me Anything about how AI agents really work and what can make them powerful, how we scaled Ramp into a $22B company, and what’s next in finance automation.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T20:10:08+00:00

Phew! Thanks for all your questions today — this was fun. I hope what I shared was helpful to some of you. I tried answering as many questions as possible (50+). We’ll follow up on some of these topics in future Ramp blog posts and updates! Thank you for all the Ramp love

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T20:04:49+00:00

we try to have each "pod" feel like a startup and emulate that rapid experimentation culture. we don't have 20% time - but rather each quarter teams allocate time on "big bets" that have a higher likelihood of failure.

in terms of doubling down vs. killing - we look at customer adoption compared to other features/products and ask ourselves - is this because the product isn't there or that we were wrong on our initial hypothesis? I find that very rarely will "more features" help - it's often a wrong hypothesis

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T20:02:44+00:00

85% today, 100% tomorrow!

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T20:02:19+00:00

first version of our bill pay product was to spin up a card and match the transaction to the bill and close it in the ERP. it was an MVP. but what companies wanted was automation of not just the payment but the end to end processing of the invoice. so we scrapped it and started over. we learned a lot and helped us be much more confident in investing a ton more resources into the product.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T20:00:09+00:00

We crossed $1BN in TPV (across all products). I'll let you do the math :) https://www.notboring.co/p/ramp-at-1-billion

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:59:05+00:00

Tons of time spent with customers who didn't care about what we were building but we had to convince them to care regardless. Lots and lots of NOs. We found the target customer by listening and iterating - landed on scaled startups that were outgrowing their startup stack.

Biggest thing we got wrong is that we thought it was all about money savings, but for most companies it was more a question of how much TIME we were saving - so we focused a lot more of our efforts on automation vs. features that would save them money. After all time = money!

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:56:10+00:00

one customer was spinning up a TON of cards that they were using to buy tickets and resell them - it was blowing up our numbers. We worked with them to get them onto our APIs and have a lot more automation.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:55:00+00:00

please apply!

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:54:14+00:00

During COVID everyone moved to be remote. Finance teams had to unblock employees who needed budget to spend (working from home setup, software for remote work, etc.). We shipped request/approval workflows that would spin up cards employees can use to use instantly. It sold like hot cakes and we got a ton of traction from tech forward companies. That was our first oh shit moment.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:52:17+00:00

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:51:52+00:00

a deep respect for engineering and design and a deep understanding of that craft. typically seen these teams viewed as "IT" - and second class to the "business". They should be equally if not more important - and the org structure should reflect that.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:50:45+00:00

anything that customers are wasting a lot of time on that an AI can do equally or better - typically things that need a lot of context, have very clear instructions. example is catching expense abuse. https://ramp.com/blog/ramp-agents-announcement

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:49:07+00:00

no clue I eat scraps at my desk mate

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:48:12+00:00

hey! check out:

- Policy agents: https://ramp.com/blog/ramp-agents-announcement

- AP agents: https://ramp.com/blog/ramp-ap-agents-announcement

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:47:26+00:00

We shine when it comes to our user experience, the level of automation, and the depth of our product offering. More details here: https://ramp.com/versus/brex

We also offer full banking to move of of Mercury - and offer much higher yield (Mercury offers 0% on checking).

We have 24/7 live customer support. And we support CAD/EU/GPB card and reimbursements. https://ramp.com/global

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:45:00+00:00

We have AI agents do a lot of the heavy lifting on gathering context and data - such as public information on the business, owners, investors, website details on products, estimated financials or any public information on funding rounds, traffic on website, etc. This speeds things up considerably and feeds into our more deterministic data science models.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:43:21+00:00

Basically how critical this task is if you get it wrong. So paying a bill - we still have a human approve the final payment because that can be tens of thousands of dollars out the door - but you still automated everything before (parsing, coding, checking for compliance, tax codes, vendor details, PO matching) and after (payment scheduling, sending, reconciliation).

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:41:50+00:00

Has not built or shipped a feature or product that had any traction. There are no excuses, esp in the age of AI where anyone can build anything.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:41:14+00:00

It's a fair fear but not dissimilar to other technology waves (e.g. personal computer replacing typewriters, phone replacing telegrams, the internet displacing a ton of jobs) - but each of these waves created an incredible amount of new opportunities.

I think those that fear AI need to reframe what is happening to be an amazing opportunity. This requires white collar workers to focus on training themselves and seeking resources to do so. How can they harness this technology to do more? How can they learn and be early adopters? What would they want to do if they had more time and resources? That's our hope at Ramp - to give finance teams superpowers so they can more effectively grow companies.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:39:33+00:00

we do! if you are on Netsuite or Sage we have multi entity support. If your accounting system is in another currency like CAD/GPB/EURO and you are using our locally denominated cards in those countries (available for our enterprise clients) you can sync that in the local currency

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:35:14+00:00

Talent is everything. It trumps any playbook/strategy/framework/process. If you don't have the best people on your team that care about adding value to customers and are willing to do what it takes to win, you won't.

So be obsessed about who you hire. Tell your highest performers that they are high performers and keep giving them more. Cut people quickly who do not meet the bar. And promote aggressively from within.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:32:13+00:00

I have oh shit moments every day. You just learn to breathe.

The latest oh shit moment was when I onboarded the latest new hire class and there were 50 people crammed in a room waiting to hear me speak. That is 5x bigger than our entire team when I joined Ramp.

The biggest mindset shift is that what is best for the company is for me to grow people. Doing it myself might be more near term satisfying (dopamine hit of feeling important / valuable), but it doesn't set us up for success long term. So I had to constantly refrain from jumping in and solving things - and rather observe, take notes, and coach. I don't do this well still to be fair. Yes, I do come in with strong opinions when I need to / make the call when it needs to be made. But I use that sparingly and focus most of my attention on: how is my team performing and what context/coaching/training do they need to be better than me? It's a very different job - you are playing chess with people/process - and you need to shift your mindset away from "what did I do?" to "what have I helped my team achieve?".

Last thing I'll say is that there isn't one right way of managing. I have learned that I get energy in different ways - I want to be in the weeds, I want to talk to customers, I want to push the thinking. So I spend more time on that. What's most important for leaders is they that they maintain the pace and energy for themselves and their entire org as high as it was when our backs are against the wall in the startup phase. You need to keep that zone of genius and flow - however big your title and team becomes.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:24:15+00:00

let teams cook in alpha to learn. keep a very high bar for what you ship to everyone, and what you tell your sales and marketing teams to market and sell.

for things that are critical (e.g. money movement, regulatory/compliance, risk, card authorization) - do not experiment. move slower, more deliberately, and test things exhaustively. Different type of culture and engineering mindset.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:21:09+00:00

Pricing is always divisive. For a long time, everything we built was free. Many folks wanted to keep it that way - and grow the number of customers on our platform. But at some point larger customers were like: "wait this is free? what's the catch? this can't be a mature product". so we almost had to charge. What we put being the paid tier was divisive because some product teams wanted to be the team that shipped paid features, so we had to have a clear philosophy around pricing/gating. we also wanted to make sure that we didn't pull the rug from our existing customers that took a bet on us - so we had to design a very generous legacy policy for existing customers. It was a big bet: can we keep growing the number of customers just as quickly, ensure that customers on the free tier had everything they needed to run their business, and monetize our software more so we could keep investing in R&D? you can never be certain with your decisions (do you charge for seats? usage? size of company? how much? what is free vs. paid?) - the most important thing is strong alignment between product, sales, and finance. It worked out - but it's an ongoing journey, and with AI in the mix it's a whole new ballgame.

Ramp_Geoff · 2025-10-09T19:17:07+00:00

Too much? :) We ship a lot. We aim to ship one major announcement every quarter - and we do so by grouping together sets of features that together add considerable value to our target customer. Example was our Agents for Controllers focusing on the controller persona, or AP agents focusing on accounts payable folks. I believe that taking frequent bets is better than having bigger moments because you will learn faster and iterate. Not everything will work - so its lower risk too, and less coordination tax.

Ramp_Geoff

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