00:02:03 · George Bonaci
[00:02:03] S0: So many. And actually, think it's probably a good sign that I don't remember many of the bets that don't work out. I I I remember a lot of the crazy ones that I didn't think would work out and ended up working out great. I think, like, a a very crazy one that actually someone posted about on Twitter the other day was was advertising in fortune cookies. I remember someone on my team found a company that did that, and I thought it was in... Insane. Was like, there's no way we're going to do this, especially to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the minimum order size was like over $100, and I did not think this was going to work. But I saw the conviction. And again, like, have to encourage and foster a culture of people wanting to take risks, think outside the box, do things that probably don't make sense on the surface because that's where the alpha is. So, yeah, we did this fortune cookie test where we dropped fortune cookies in restaurants across a couple specific markets, and then we measured the inbound traffic that we got just to ramp.com. And you can kind of see that when the fortune cookies were going out, traffic went up very, very statistically significantly. And then when the fortune cookies are not going out, the traffic got dropped back down to baseline. And we did a bit of a paired test where we dropped them and then removed them and dropped them and removed them. And, like, the correlation was was was, like, on point. So that's a crazy one that that ended up working. But arguably, like a lot of the stunts, lot of the viral marketing that we do, like, I'm not good at that kind of thing. So my general first take is there's no way this is going to work. But you can kind of judge what you wanna take a bet on based on the conviction of the person pitching it. If you ask a few questions and they start to backpedal or fold, probably don't have a lot of conviction. And if they don't have conviction, why should I? But if they really believe in it, like the answer kinda has to be yes. Otherwise, why are you hiring smart people?
00:03:33 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:03:33] S1: Exactly. Yeah. And typically, like, from your perspective, like, as a VP of growth and, like, really managing, like, all of that, how much budget do you give to people? Because if you think, like, this idea of fortune cookie is actually crazy, and someone tells you, hey, it's gonna cost like, I don't know, $250,000 to just experiment it. Like, how do you balance how much people can spend? And if it doesn't work, like, do you help people accountable or how exactly does that work?
00:04:00 · George Bonaci
[00:04:00] S0: Yes. So a few things. I think the first is at a very, very high level as an organization. You need to carve out a budget with no expectations for return. Otherwise, if everything is always a trade off on what the return is going to be, you're just going to invest in things that already work and you're not going to find new opportunities. So number one is like carving out a budget, no expectations. You can do whatever. You can fail 100% of time with this... A percent of the time with this and that's completely fine. I think that's number one. I think number two is like, okay, for individual projects, how much budget are you going to allocate to it? I think it really depends on what do you need to actually learn something to reach statistical significance, to get enough qualitative conversations where you can kind of understand how things are going. And for some things, that's a lot of money. For other things, that's that's very little money. But a lot of times more money means you're going to get signal faster, which is kind of the the third point, is learning as quickly as possible is is more important than learning something perfectly but slowly. So I'd much rather put a $100,000 to something and know if it's going to work or not in a week, then $20,000 and wait a month or six months or whatever it might be. So I think it's number numb numb... Or like a third point to keep in mind. But in terms of like the accountability, it's almost similarly a portfolio approach. Like, I expect people to fail a lot. If you fail 100% of the time and you haven't learned anything, there's a problem. You gotta figure out why you're wrong a lot. And I think the more senior you are, the higher the expectations are. I think if you were a director, VP, you should probably be right more often than not. That's kind of what we're paying you to do. If you're relatively earlier... Early in career, you're still learning. Ideally, you also have kind of like more of a fresh mind. You have crazier ideas. You have more out of the box things you want to try. You haven't been jaded by by working for a few decades. You get a lot more leeway. Like, I'm not going to blame you for failing 90 plus percent of the time, especially if you're learning something, especially if I can see that you're getting better at your craft and your intuition is sharpening.
00:05:45 · George Bonaci, Guillaume Moubeche
That's always how I think about it. [00:05:47] S1: Yeah. And I think like the bigger the budget, the the bigger the the pressure should be on the person, like, to make it work and therefore, like, give their best. So I think it makes sense whenever you can do it, like, you should aim for it.
00:05:59 · George Bonaci
[00:05:59] S0: I completely agree. I think where a lot of people get tripped up is they do a lot of thinking about something, invested in it and then they think, like the minimum amount to do x is some big number. And usually that's just a problem with the experimental design. Like you can almost always scope things down enough where it is a minimal budget, whatever that might mean for your company. There's a minimal budget and you'll actually get some signal that this is going to work or not. Fortune cookies is a good example where, okay, like what was the hypothesis there? The hypothesis was that like a lot of business decision makers or finance professionals are eating out at restaurants when they're traveling or or whatever it might be and like reaching them in an unexpected way where maybe their guard is down would help build brand awareness. So that's like very high level, like hypothesis. Maybe we didn't actually need a $100,000 to go and test that hypothesis. Maybe the minimum order size was a $100,000 for this fortune cookie project, but you could probably go test to the same thing with, I don't know, some smaller mom and pop restaurant where, you know, business owners go. You could actually just go interview customers. You could try it in some other way, maybe instead of like fortune cookies where there's a large minimum order size, you could do it with an insert in the bill and you could do a partnership with a couple couple restaurants. So I think it always comes down to if the dollar amount is too big and, like, you're actually thinking about making a very risky big bet. Like, can you scope that down and learn the same thing?
00:07:11 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:07:11] S1: Yeah. Really interesting. Another point I wanna touch base on in Ramp, I think in 2023 was valued at around like 5 or 6,000,000,000. Now it's like 44,000,000,000 this year. Total payment volume, I think, was still growing 170% year on year in March, despite the business, like, being roughly, like, 20 times larger. So how exactly do you keep growing like a startup when you're definitely, like, no longer a startup?