# Why Ramp? 3/7/2026 I’m coming up to four years at the best job I’ve ever had. I joined Ramp before it was clear that it could be that: mostly wanting something new + leaning on trust in the people I knew here. I figure it’s worth reflecting on, at least in hindsight, why it went so well; if I have any hope of replicating it in the future. ![[IMG_2296 1.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_2367.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_3075.jpeg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307193859.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307193927.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307190735.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307190757.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191006.png|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191143.jpg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191248.png|]] ![[Pasted image 20260307191311.png|]] --- I was working at a (remote) company that multiplied its eng headcount by several orders of magnitude. A lot of my work went from novel (or at least creative) engineering work to bureaucratic maintenance. I’d known for a few months that it was time for me to look elsewhere, despite my (continued) affinity towards the company. I had some conversations, interviewed at a few places, but nothing felt worth giving up my golden handcuffs. ![[IMG_4360.jpeg|DM from an old friend and mentor, Veeral]] When I got the message from Veeral; I was open to the conversation for a few reasons. - I already wanted a reason to switch. - Ramp had been in my peripheral vision. I’d known Veeral since high school; we were in the same “HS Hackers” group, he read my college essays, etc. A friend from the hackNY fellowship, Kwuang, was another founding engineer. A year earlier, I’d talked to Pavel about being roommates in New York; he moved much faster than me, and with a less miserly budget, so it didn’t work out — but I inferred a lot of agency based on that convo and his Twitter activity. - I’d *just* left New York — Colorado was more convenient for friends / relationship / family — but I still had a degree of attachment to it, and this was a NY startup. So Ramp admittedly came in very warm, and a lot of human / non-commercial factors were involved in the “decision.” I still remember the interview process pretty vividly too — in retrospect an absurdly good set of people. Pavel, Stephen Snow, Max Lahey, Pablo Meier, Patrick Anderson. I remember pushing Pavel on what he perceived the long-term ambitions of the company to be. Patrick and I mostly talked about Hacker News and public markets investing (the latter I actually don’t know a lot about) — Miami in the background, from the Founders Fund office. The technical problems were hard enough to feel good about completing; but I also didn’t care enough about the outcome (yet) to let my nerves kick in. Everyone was noticeably thoughtful and grounded. If I were to distill why it was a clear yes, it wasn’t really product or ambition — though I constantly pressure-tested on ambition, as something I was paranoid they were missing (how far can you really take a corporate card?) — but it was that every single person I’d talked to had in common: - No BS (slightly anti-BS) - Humility I was disillusioned working on a world-changing vision (that I still believe in!), in an [oil-cursed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) environment that didn’t need discipline. I’d talked to a bunch of crypto teams & investors around the time — wanting badly to double-down, but finding the reality-distortion field uncomfortable. I found Ramp incredibly refreshing. I wanted something “boring but real,” with people who weren’t just *stuck* in “boring” for a lack of options. I was also too early in my career to risk not seeing the world in front of me clearly, even if it meant I couldn’t parlay the last thing into the next. I secretly really *liked* that corporate cards were something Twitter people made fun of you for working on; knowing that the *people* working on them were as good as they were. The discrepancy felt “alpha”-shaped. --- Part of why I felt I *could* join a company like this was that I trusted myself to leave if it didn’t live up to the hype. My willingness to leave my golden handcuffs behind gave me this faith. I’d also left New York; I was much happier in Colorado, but this was a move that felt costly in terms of opportunity and status. It also reinforced my feeling that I wouldn’t be precious about these things, in light of new info. I thought even if Ramp was good, that I’d probably spend two years there and leave afterwards. I stayed way longer than I thought I would, and Ramp gave me a lot of reasons to over the years. I joined in October 2022, on the Bill Pay team — joining three other engineers on an emerging “Payments” pod: - Shreyan (my manager/tech lead, creator of Ramp’s Payments Platform, co-creator of Bill Pay) - Andrew (one of the greatest crypto-skeptics i’ve ever known) - Clara (a great onboarding buddy + my ear to the NY office streets) - and later Leina (a major bar-raiser + great friend & peer). Pavel was the founding tech lead behind Ramp Bill Pay, and my skip-level. Purely based on his age and ”years of experience” — I was both fascinated/excited (clearly this was a place that rewarded slope), but also curious about the practicality. He ended up being an incredible leader of many people — additionally a high-output/agency IC — and I learned a lot working for and with him. ![[Pasted image 20260307204852.jpg|]] I don’t think the Payments pod was by my choice — I’d mentioned to the recruiter that I was interested in “platform” as a means of leveraged impact (I was secretly just trying to resell my previous experience as a source of “expertise”). But I could not imagine, in retrospect, a better team or project for me at the company — I’ve really loved Payments, more than most of the other things we do, and I don’t know that I’d have gotten to do as much anywhere else. Immediately - my task was to take a paper check API integration Clara implemented, and integrate it e2e in our Bill Pay product. Seemed straightforward enough, and I got it “done” — excited that I was *trusted* to! — but I was in for a hard reality check. I’d failed to confirm that user-inputted memos flowed all the way through to our partner, and hadn’t really considered downsides to using Ramp’s office address for the `return_address`. ![[Pasted image 20260307203208.jpg|]] Our punishment: a bunch of vendors who couldn’t figure out what the check was paying them for (they’d need the memo), and mailing them back to the Ramp office. My specific punishment: the guilt for inviting this hell onto my Ops counterpart Pravika, who’d joined the same time as me, and was in the NY office triaging hundreds of physical checks while I was supporting remotely.  I actually love checks! Our [partners](https://increase.com/) have since gotten their own check printing facility, we can literally do overnight delivery (create a bill today, the piece of paper is at your vendor’s door literally tomorrow morning via FedEx), and it’s one of the spiritually cooler payment instruments. The sheer *reality* embedded in this problem space — the wrong bug causing actual physical mayhem — scratched a major itch for me. I wasn’t abstracted away from or insured against what we actually did for people. I got addicted to that feeling of responsibility: I’d learned to email customers personally to help triage edge-case payments that needed extra input, built our original monitoring stack and compulsively stared at everything that would go wrong. You’d see the names of the business in the tooling, sometimes their counterparty; and I felt a (slightly delusional) sense of responsibility around making sure these economic participants - patriots! - were able to get settled up. There was so much *meaning* embedded in the work, relative to anything I’d ever worked on. This is a crack rock that kept me here pretty long. Ramp gave me serious responsibility far earlier than anyone else would, and has always been a place that: - under-hires, and makes everyone an *owner* of a major company function: rather than diffusing crumbs of ownership between a lot of people. - takes bets on people *beyond* their pre-Ramp pedigree; slope over intercept — but actually practiced to a near-absurd degree. My skip-level being someone who started as an intern and skipped to founding tech-lead (leaving as a leader of tens of people + a multibillion TPV product), teammates who came in from previous lives as Minecraft modders, etc — it was genuinely practiced to the furthest extent we could get away with. Just a few months into the gig, my manager Shreyan put in his notice. He took some time to explore, came back to set some of the foundations that would turn into Ramp Treasury, and then left once again to be Elad Gil’s Chief of Staff. Andrew switched to platformize cards, Clara to lead Bill Pay, Leina to lead Ledger Platform; Pavel, Rodda, and Patrick left to start companies. I was given the chance to lead Payments at Ramp, and my first direct report. --- I still had a lot to learn; Kat, my PM counterpart on Payments, recognized this, and took me along to sales calls, customer calls, conversations with our own AP and accounting teams, and was a major teacher to me in this period. We had our sights on major international expansion: not just being able to *pay out* international counterparties, but being able to make payments *on behalf of international entities*, originating them locally across Canada, the EU, UK, and beyond. This would necessarily be a long-term project; across complex cross-border/FX flows, bespoke partnerships, onboarding & underwriting, and more — powering our biggest multinational clients. ![[Pasted image 20260307220110.jpg|]]![[Pasted image 20260307215949.jpg|]] Tristan and I spent time poring over weakly-conformant ISO-20022 docs and spreadsheets; on calls with half-technical “implementation” teams at the banks, plugging stuff into a dumber-in-hindsight version of ChatGPT, building with pre-REST technologies my parents would likely be more familiar with. And we got our first local collection rails live. This still left the complex, third-party payments flow — FX and all — to solve with new partners. We went through several potential partnerships before landing on the ones that could actually meet our bar. The card team was simultaneously rolling out local issuance and underwriting; we’d have to port their entity onboarding work to these new partners and flows, and multiplex the product to support the new combinatorial complexity. We had to solve FX in the light of slow local debit rails, “mandate” concepts in new geos, and more — but we got that stuff done too, and unlocked multinationals who needed Ramp for their local entities abroad, and subsequently local businesses too. I didn’t know almost anything deep about international payments and FX until this period; it was a lot of work, often fairly challenging and demanding of us and our partners, and sometimes even unclear how far out we were from the finish line. But we shipped it all, and set the foundation for Ramp to expand to an order of magnitude greater set of geographies. ![[Pasted image 20260307221625.jpg|]]![[Pasted image 20260307221645.jpg|]]