Just Copywriting Tips

7th August, 2025. One hundred days. I'm burning the boats.

I first met Calvin in 2016. Karim and I had just launched Paribus. We weren’t a big company. Our office was my kitchen table. So when an email from a 17-year-old high school dropout landed in my inbox asking for an internship, I skimmed by it. Thankfully, Karim didn’t! - Admitted into MIT at age 16 - Code running on the International Space Station - Top 20 in the country in the Putnam Math Competition Calvin arrived on his first day in a T-shirt he wore representing the United States in a programming competition. Three weeks later he’d built an AI model to automate refund decisions. This was years before people knew what AI even was. Fast forward four years. Karim and I start Ramp. Our first phone call? Persuading Calvin to join as a founding engineer. The challenge: make filing an expense as easy as taking a photo of a receipt! Fortunately, Calvin looks at hard problems the way a dog looks at a bone. I watched him come back to the office every night, just as I was leaving, Wendy’s in hand, no small talk, working because he wanted to, only pausing to watch The Yankees’ playoff run. Eighty thousand expenses a day are now submitted using the code he wrote. Each one takes just 15 seconds, not 15 minutes. That’s 20,000 hours of work saved every day! Why am I telling this story? I think founders get too much credit. The single most important thing we do is hire people smarter than us. Phil Knight had Jeff Johnson, who drove to track meets across the Pacific Northwest and sold the first 3,250 pairs of Nike’s from the boot of his car. That’s why you’re wearing Nikes. Steve Jobs had Ken Kocienda, who mapped thousands of thumb taps to solve the seemingly impossible problem of touch-typing on glass. That’s why you have an iPhone in your pocket. Calvin is one of those people. Who wouldn’t want him to file your expenses?

New essay: Conviction

Good copy is falsifiable