christian lawless 🇺🇸

@eglyman @tryramp @carlquintanilla @SaraEisen #5 on the disruptor list, but #1 in our hearts. Let's go @tryramp!

last time @tryramp grew this fast year-over-year, we were 1/20th the size ~170% TPV growth in March. growth usually decays with scale — ours re-accelerated on CNBC this morning with @carlquintanilla and @SaraEisen for the Disruptor 50

@eglyman @calvinleenyc incredible story

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?

@eglyman @karimatiyeh @tryramp Excited to use paribus once again! Congratulations on the launch of Ramp Price Drop!

Over a decade ago, @karimatiyeh and I launched a startup that helped people get money back when prices dropped after a purchase. With today's launch at @tryramp, we've come full circle - Ramp Price Drop is now saving businesses an average of 12% per booking. We hope you love it!

@zebulgar Well done! 🚀

Incredibly excited for this year's Hill and Valley Forum Over a short few years we've made it the pre-eminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather Jensen Huang, Alex Karp, etc and 30+ Senators and Representatives This year's agenda here:

@cognition_labs Here we go!

Introducing Devin 2.0: a new agent-native IDE experience. Generally available today starting at $20. 🧵👇

@WillManidis Is this a reference to the OpenAi and Deepseek saga?

there's something very dangerous about setting out to learn from the greats once they are already great. the stories they tell about how they made it are pleasant little archetypal fictions. revenge, love, ego. all of them fiction. truth is only available during the journey

@eglyman @karimatiyeh @tryramp Congratulations to an incredible team and company, including Will Petrie, @geoffintech, and @koblovinamerica !

The most impactful leaders don’t stand by on the sidelines. They grab a shovel and dig with the team. Today, @karimatiyeh and I are grateful to announce 3 promotions of leaders at @tryramp who embody that ethos and have been instrumental to our growth these past few years: Will Petrie, our new Chief Financial Officer. Will has helped Ramp grow contribution profit by an order of magnitude and secure nearly $1B in new financings since the start of 2023. His ability to distill our business into its core drivers and communicate them simply has sharpened our focus on what matters most: delivering value to our customers. Geoff Charles, our new Chief Product Officer. @geoffintech was our very first product hire (and among our first 15 team members). He has led our evolution from pre-launch to product-market fit, to five distinct, industry-leading product lines. His customer obsession and commitment to velocity has created a machine that ships 150+ new products per year that make it easier for customers to seamlessly manage their finances. Nik Koblov, our new EVP of Engineering. @koblovinamerica brings dedication to engineering excellence and has scaled Ramp’s engineering team from a handful of people to hundreds of the most talented engineers in tech. By cultivating talent density, active mentorship, modern systems, and lightning-fast release cycles, he’s laid a strong foundation for our next wave of customer-focused features and infrastructure improvements. As co-founders, we've always believed that building a world-class company requires nurturing and elevating exceptional talent from within. Looking ahead, we’ve set significant goals — including expanding our product suite, exploring new markets, and doubling down on the innovations that have made Ramp the go-to partner for any business seeking to operate at higher levels of financial efficiency. Whether you’re a longtime customer, a brand-new partner, or simply following along, we’re incredibly excited about what lies ahead and couldn't be more confident in this team to help take us there. To Will, Geoff, Nik and the full Ramp team: thank you for building with us. Here's to the next chapter!

@zebulgar there is no going back now

I've been investing personally into startups for 12 years now (really only ~7 years as a professional/with real dollars) Today I crossed an important milestone where this number went above 1 J-curve!

Similarly, you showed immense kindness to me and my team from Lehman London. At a time when uncertainty and anxiety were at their peak, you extended an invaluable opportunity by offering us roles within your organization. I’ve always been deeply grateful for your support and generosity during such a difficult period.

This is the 14 year anniversary weekend of the Lehman Bankruptcy that marked the bottom of the horrible 2008 financial crisis. Some never before seen texts between me and Lehman CEO Dick Fuld. Also some important lessons.

@davidmarcus San Pellegrino 💔

I’ve been down the rabbit hole of bottled drinking water quality, and I was shocked to learn that most of them are full of contaminants, chemicals, and microplastics. Some, way beyond guidelines. Fiji & San Pellegrino below. 90% of them are terrible. Marketing ≠ reality!

@russelljkaplan @scale_AI @alexandr_wang Congrats @russelljkaplan !!

I recently left @scale_AI. I'm so thankful to the team there and for @alexandr_wang's bet to acquire our startup nearly 4 years ago. When I joined Scale, it was a single-product company building the data engine for autonomous vehicles. It's amazing to see how far Scale has come: now the leading data company for LLMs, AI prime for the US gov, with a fast-growing enterprise business and more revenue than just about every AI startup. And I’m even more bullish on what the Scale team will accomplish in the coming years. Leading ML and ML infra at Scale, working with foundation model labs for their data and eval needs, was a unique window into the future. More to come shortly on where I think ML progress is headed and what’s next for me. For now, thank you to the incredible team at Scale for making the past few years as special as they were.

@karimatiyeh 🚀

Today marks 5 years since Ramp began. Reflecting on the journey so far, I wish I’d captured more of those early, chaotic moments that set the foundation for our growth. But I’ll probably look back one day and realize that today was still very early, so it’s a good time to start. Here’s where we came from and the long road ahead… 1. Early chaos In 2019-2020, Ramp was a heat-seeking missile focused on insanely rapid development and gathering a team of ambitious overachievers. We started in living rooms turned into makeshift offices before transitioning to a more permanent space, complete with the quirks of startup life, including free furniture and unexpected visits from NYC fauna. Our public launch was February 2020, on the eve of a global pandemic — an incredibly chaotic time for a company built on business spending. We immediately shifted to remote work and found solace in virtual team bonding. This period tested our resilience but also showed us the special connection we had with our early customers, who believed in our vision and were thankful for our support through dark moments for their own businesses. 2. Growth amid uncertainty Miraculously, in retrospect, we grew during the lockdowns. Despite the odds, we meticulously reviewed every single application and put in the hours to make sure every customer had a stellar onboarding experience. Following the Explosive growth of our customer base, our team grew 3x by the end of 2020, many of whom embraced our culture without having seen our office. Five years later, Ramp stands at 700+ strong, serving a wide range of 25k+ clients from potato farmers to space factories and coffee-roasting monks. It’s a testament to the hard work of our team and our ability to level up finance teams and remove busywork for our customers. 3. Looking to the future Today, Ramp is becoming the solution of choice for the most ambitious and fastest-growing companies — yet, we still represent a tiny percentage of total B2B spend. That’s a good thing and confirms what all of us can feel instinctively: we still have a LOT more room to grow. One thing that hasn’t changed in five years is our appetite for a challenge. I’m fired up for the untapped opportunity and excited to tackle it with the most talented team in the world. It still feels like day 0. As we celebrate today, I'm grateful for everyone who has been part of this journey, from employees to alumni to investors to customers. And I can’t wait to share a lot more of what we’ve been working on at Ramp. Here's to the next five years!

@katekiewel Neither one

Prenuvo vs Ezra. Opinions?

I agree getting your baseline is critically important. Most Dr’s while good intentioned tell you to exercise more and eat less red meat if you have high cholesterol. There is clear correlation between high triglycerides and plaque build up, but getting a calc score sets the baseline. Other markers like lipo (a) as well are critically important and hereditary. Good news is, there are drugs on the way to lower them.

2/ I was green on cholesterol - my concierge doctor said you are in great health - you don’t need a Calcium CT. But I insisted bc I have had too many friends die young of heart attacks. I scored a 77 on my Calcium CT which is avg for men my age. The discovery of plaque led me to 1) get a CT Angiogram / Heartflow which found below avg uncalcified plaque / limited blockage (good news) 2) take a statin / ezetimibe which has reduced my LDL to 36. I am now preventing the build up of addt plaque and have a baseline to monitor and avoid problems. Living without data is NOT a strategy!

Well intended cholesterol charts have mis-led millions of people about heart disease. Cholesterol is NOT a predictor of heart attacks - approx 50% of heart attack patients have LDL levels in the green! Get a Calcium CT Scan of your arteries - $100 / 30 mins can save your life.🤍

@patrickbetdavid @DavidBahnsen A big percent of those hybrid mortgages will reset in the coming years and people wont have a choice.

A few factors why people aren’t selling or buying a house. 92% of Americans have a mortgage below 6% right now 61% are below 4% 23% have a mortgage below 3% 🍀 (source @DavidBahnsen) So what would cause people to start selling & buying: 1. Americans running out of savings Personal savings in 🇺🇸 reached $686 Billion in 2022, the lowest figures since 2009. 2020: we had $3 trillion 2021: we had $2.5 trillion 2022: $686 billion 2023: $800 billion (as of April) We went up slightly but as savings decreases, that panic could cause owners to sell at a lower price. 2. Unemployment. It’s still at 3.6% ish and hasn’t gone up to the 10% many thought like it did in 2008. The market expected unemployment to skyrocket if Powell kept increasing rates. Hasn’t happened yet. 3. Congress has more power than Powell Everytime Powell increased the rates to help address obsession the govt has with over spending the last 14 years with low interest rates, congress undermined it by delaying the time bomb that was coming to the next generation. So will anything happen with a massive crash in real estate? In certain pockets, maybe. But across the country, probably not. Let the fake success economy continue. No politician or majority of congress has the brass to actually do what’s best for 🇺🇸. Zero chance of getting elected let alone re-elected. Our current structure with no term limits will hurt the next 2 or 3 generations. Someone with brass who doesn’t care about pleasing the majority needs to take the lead. But can that person get elected? 🤔

@perkinscr97 You couldn’t find two companies or situations more dissimilar. The only similarities are they both went bankrupt, like thousands of companies before them have. That is where the comparison ends.

I was on the trading floor at Lehman when we went bankrupt. Some reflections and lessons learned as we digest the FTX insolvency. The similarities are eerily similar.🧵

@AOC Do you know what leverage is?

One guy’s business plan for a $44 billion over-leveraged purchase is apparently to run around and individually ask people for $8. Remember that next time you question yourself or your qualifications.

@NWischoff We will all be working for you some day, just a matter of time.

Conversion Capital announced its third fund today (122M). While he won't brag about it, Christian Lawless is an unstoppable force. If you are looking for an early stage lead investor in fintech and infra, @Lawlito is your guy.

@eglyman @ConversionCap @karimatiyeh @tryramp Thanks @eglyman and @karimatiyeh 🙏🏻 We have been the fortunate ones to get a front row seat on your incredible journey and unrivaled execution. I have a feeling youre just getting started

Christian @Lawlito and the @ConversionCap team have supported @karimatiyeh and me since the earliest days, backing the seed rounds at both Paribus.co and @tryramp. Truly a great partner for those building in fintech. techcrunch.com/2022/06/28/a-l…

@mattturck Automating the 11 trillion $ mortgage industry via software by removing the need for in-person meetings and paper applications so borrowers can benefit from lower rates @blendlabsinc

Running list of startups / categories that are proving anti-fragile to the current mess: * Remote work: Zoom etc * Gaming, online entertainment * Social (Twitter), messaging * Food delivery: Blue Apron etc * Online education * Telehealth, digital thermometers * What else?