Karim Atiyeh

speaker

955 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 21 Oct

Karim Atiyeh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445] · 21 Oct 2025 podcast

I think within the span of a year where we're like approaching a million users,

It's growing very fast and the experience of building it was incredibly challenging because unlike Ramp or unlike every most tech companies, you are building a product on top of a very unpredictable foundation.

We are building products on top of the websites of retailers who, one, don't want us there, two, are changing their pages all the time, and three, are heavily incentivized to make it harder for us over time.

And when we started building Parabas around that time, Amazon still used to send receipts to your inbox.

I don't know if you remember this, but you used to get a full itemized receipt with the price of every single item that you bought.

You don't anymore.

You now get a link that says, thanks for shopping at Amazon.

If you would like to see your receipt, please click here.

And you have to go to amazon.com, log in, press a couple buttons, and eventually you make it to your receipt.

So they made it harder over time to get those receipts.

Pretty sure that we were running one of the largest scraping operations in the U.S.

at the time, going through at some point billions of emails per day and tens of millions of receipts per day.

I would say a lot of pragmatism in engineering systems.

This idea that you're never going to really build a perfect system.

So you're better off building something quickly that will break in very predictable ways.

And you are able to recover from incredibly quickly.

So the idea with Parabas was you start with the assumption that things will break.

that you are trying to speed up the process of fixing them quickly when they break, as opposed to building the system that will never break.

And it is very different from how I'd say most experienced engineers learn how to do engineering at larger companies.

where you are trying to build like a great system that will not break and that will withstand the test of time.

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