Inside Ramp: How Two Founders Engineered a Billion-Dollar Company in 18 Months

Eric Lyman and his co-founder Kareem set an almost unthinkable goal before launching Ramp: achieve a billion-dollar valuation within 18 months. Against industry conventions, they succeeded and built a company now valued upwards of $20 billion in just six years.

Building at Lightning Speed: The Execution Strategy

Instead of proceeding incrementally, the founders built Ramp for extreme velocity from inception.

Compressed Timelines: Set aggressive milestones (e.g., bank partner onboarding <60 days, network approvals <45 days).
Revenue Acceleration: Grew ~70x year-over-year from near-zero to nearly $100M ARR by end of year two.
Hyper-Growth Scaling: Expanded headcount to 100-200 within 18 months while managing massive operational complexity.

“We knew that if we wanted to leave our careers, we wanted to make this company big—either huge quickly or fail really quickly. We designed it to ship fast.” — Eric Lyman

Business Model Fundamentals

Ramp operates within the corporate card space. Despite industry misconceptions, Lyman details how revenue works:

Companies like Ramp (the issuer) earn primarily through a portion of interchange fees – transaction fees generated when a card is used:

Merchants receive the majority of the spend.
Processors (e.g., Stripe) retain ~0.1-0.5% net.
Card networks (Visa/Mastercard) keep ~0.1-0.4%.
Issuers absorb credit/default risk and earn most remaining interchange.

Founder Mindset & Sustainability Strategies

Lyman stresses operational discipline even when experiencing high growth.

Instead of purely chasing hyper-growth metrics, Ramp emphasizes:

Anticipating Bottlenecks: Proactively solving problems 3-6 months ahead, unlike reactive strategies at Lyman's previous company (Paribus).
Talent Philosophy: Seeking people deeply motivated by their craft rather than cultivating unsustainable "burnout" culture.
Long-term Compounding: Viewing the banking/enterprise software market’s vast size as an opportunity for decades-long sustained ~30% growth.

"If you can identify a business that grows 30% for 30 years, you become a giant."

Validated Opportunity: Unmodernized B2B Finance

Market insights drove Ramp’s focus:

The corporate card and SMB finance landscape remained dominated by traditional banks, characterized by:

Legacy Banking	Ramp's Opportunity
Product innovation stagnation since late 20th century	Integrate automation/visibility modern SMBs need
Prioritizing credit-driven “spend more” models	Visibility, savings, and operational controls
Slow decision-making & technical infrastructure	Agile feature deployment & integrations

Ramp targets replacing outdated finance stacks plagued by point solution complexity.

Key financial achievement within the timeframe: Ramp achieved the staggering velocity of scaling from $1 million to $100 million annual revenue in just 15-17 months. Success lay in combining ambitious intention with tactical design around spending visibility and control critical for CFOs & founders.

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