GR: A philosophy I believe in, echoed by Eric Glyman (Ramp founder), is that you can innovate in spaces with known gross profit and ultimate profit pools. Eric's point, which I’ve highlighted below, is crucial. In Brad Jacob's book "How to Make a Billion Dollars," he noted that two companies in the trash haulage industry were each earning "huge profits" of $500M per year. This observation gave him confidence that a viable business model existed to compete with.

*“In the early days of Ramp, it was less about a heavy amount of technical innovation, it was much more business model innovation. There's a business out there. It's been very profitable for a long period of time called the credit card industry.

The pro was that there wasn't a debate of ‘could credit card businesses make money?’ They're very profitable. They're multi billion dollar businesses. The problem was they were taking all the profits and designing increasingly more elaborate advertising campaigns and rewards programs and were investing very little actually in improving the core customer experience.*

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And so we just said, this is a great business. You can study it. Let's use the proceeds differently. Let's use it to create world class expense management. Let's use it to create great accounting automation. Let's help your business spend less, not more.”