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

So it works well for small businesses, but as you mature, the larger businesses tend to move a lot more of their purchasing and spending through essentially bill payments and procurement systems.

And not as much through cards.

If you try to visualize what does card spend look in a business as a, let's say, one dimension, you have card spend on the other dimension, you have either complexity of the business or number of employees or however you want to chart it, it starts to plateau at some point.

When you really think about what a real skill is at Ramp is like we're really good at, let's say, reducing the bureaucracy, complexity, time waste in a system, a company, and building software to do that.

And that has a lot of value for really large businesses.

So what this means is our mechanism for capturing value, which is small percentage of card transaction breaks for large businesses, because we drive a lot of value for them.

We built a lot of great software for them, but we're not able to capture any of that value for really, really large businesses because our revenue mechanism is not scaling.

So that's when we started thinking about, okay, great.

What is the right value capture mechanism when most of our product and engineering teams are focused on driving value for these complex businesses?

And like, well, we need to be able to charge for software.

And frankly, if we are charging for software, it will also guide us better towards the right things to do, right?

You get a feedback signal from the market that they are willing to pay for certain products because they get value from them.

And that's when we decided to transition.

There was a lot of fear when we did, I'd say internally, because you have this like beautiful business model that's working really well and everyone's a little freaked out.

Are people going to be willing to pay for it?

Is it going to hurt our conversion?

Is it going to hurt our growth?

And it turns out that not only did it not do that, in many ways it's accelerated that growth because it's incentivized

our sales team to mention those products, talk about them, and it incentivized our customers to be a lot more demanding and responsive.

And as a result, they helped us essentially guide our roadmap a lot better than if product was free and no one cared about it.

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