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You've now found your dysfunctional life coach, the Investor Formerly known as Prominent Businessman Chuck Yates. What's not to learn from the self-proclaimed Galactic Viceroy, who was publicly canned from a prominent private equity firm, has had enough therapy to quote Brene Brown chapter and verse and spends most days embarrassing himself on Energy Finance Twitter as @Nimblephatty. Chuck's diverse and entertaining guests do agree on one thing - Chuck Yates Needs a Job.
0:21 So what's your story? Who the hell are you? Oh, sure. Let's see. The running joke I use is kind of on the podcast. I have one listener, it's my mother. Okay, tell, say hi Sally and tell
0:34 Sally who you are. Hey Sally. No, I am, it's I'm Eric Lyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, but I'll tell you that, you know, the real person life version, I was born and raised in Las Vegas,
0:46 lived there for 18 years, went to school out of use, they studied economics in Mandarin, lived in China for a couple of years, and then I've mostly been back in New York working and trying to
0:56 build companies for most of the past decade.
1:01 Probably at least why I'm on podcast more now than I used to be, is I built a company called Ramp and it's one of the fastest growing fintech companies, really of the past decade You can almost
1:14 think about it as a one-stop shop command and control center for every that a company spends money in time. So you can tap a card, card as your expense report for you, you can pay bill payments,
1:27 even automated accounting. And so we serve about 30, 000 businesses from early stage companies to any kind of industry to Shopify to Airbnb, you name it. And we've raised about a billion dollars
1:40 in equity and about a thousand people, mostly based in New York, but can go any direction, whatever is most interesting. And I heard you're here because you actually want to do business with
1:50 energy companies. I do, yeah. Is that okay to say? It is. It is okay. I think it's great. I mean, I
1:59 think it's funny. I've been actually spending a lot more time in Texas in general. I grew up in the Southwest in Vegas and always kind of appreciated, maybe parts of the country that a lot of my
2:10 friends in New York don't, so to speak, but in many ways, I feel like the energy industry has almost hit the center of. you know, not just how the world is powered, but you know, I think it's a
2:22 central piece of the puzzle of the folks we're working on AI on the West Coast or right, I mean, this is the place where it gets solved or AI's potential is, you know, doesn't really come true.
2:33 Others, there's an energy crisis. It seems like it's coming. Yeah, I think Silicon Valley's kind of figured that out. You got Zuckerberg getting John Arnold on the board and you're seeing folks
2:45 sign power deals with nuclear plants and all that. So I think there is a growing realization that I'm not anti-renewables in any way, shape or form. In fact, I'm pro that. I think we need all of
2:59 it. But at the end of the day, I mean, life's just a lot better with energy. Yeah. I mean, it really sucks if you're burning dung and wood in your house. And so, okay, before we drill down
3:13 into what ramp, does, cause I want to, I want to get a, an accounting of that just so they, no pun intended. Just so the audience, the audience, what you do, let's go to China first. Yeah.
3:25 So you get a Harvard and you wind up spending time in China. What kind of drives that? And the reason I'm asking is my oldest daughter has been to China multiple times cause she was a, a Montessori
3:38 kid. So she was always doing a model UN Okay. And love China has been over there multiple times. I've never been. My kids get to go places on my credit card and not me. So what's the, what was
3:53 the, the driver for China? I mean, so some of it was, um, like I grew up in Vegas. Um, I remember it was like the mid 2000s and all the big casinos were starting to open things up out there.
4:06 And in Macau, uh, not too far away in Singapore And it seemed like at that time, this, the new center of the economic world was moving out there. And so I showed up to college in 2008. The
4:18 summer Olympics had just taken place and I felt like, you know, if I don't pick something up, I don't know what my future career would be like. I just wanted to learn something I could never learn
4:27 at home and started learning it.
4:30 I went back, I went there for the first time. My parents were nervous about it, probably similar to I think many people. It's this communist place, you know, a whole lot about it. Turns out
4:41 pretty nice, pretty welcoming and was just in the middle of an economic boom And I just got really interested in the place, the language and all of it. And I guess what I'd say, you know, Vegas
4:53 was a pretty fast growing place to grow up. I think in 1990 that about 500, 000 people by 2008, almost 2 million, I had never seen any work grow as quickly. You know, as Beijing, Guangzhou,
5:05 Shenzhen, some of the different economic centers. And so I just caught the bug and I went back every summer, worked out there, and I was on it. a Chinese game show at one point. No way. Do you
5:19 have a clip of that? Yeah, yeah. Oh, definitely. Jacob, you've got to go find the clip of that and throw it in the podcast. We'll dig it up and send it to you. I mean, it's almost like a
5:28 pastime of putting foreigners who speak Mandarin on TV. Nice, which was fine, but no, that was it. It was, you know, I actually thought I would, you know, start my whole career out there But
5:41 the more I got to know it, the more, at least from a sense of, you know, being a kid trying to find a, you know, their way in a whole vocation, there's aspects of the culture that were very
5:52 welcoming, but you couldn't really, you know, unless you came from money or you were a part of the government or something like that, it was very hard to actually start a business. And so I
6:02 realized if I wanted to be an entrepreneur or work somewhere, I should probably, you know, stay in the States I came back and. So do they view themselves as our mortal enemy and we're in this
6:11 grand struggle for humanity and all that or is that kind of me just being a
6:24 xenophobic Texan? You know, I think, you know, in most parts of the world, most people are just good people, you know, good, honest, hardworking, you know, just looking for a better life.
6:38 And I think that's really true I mean, you know, getting to know and go to school with and meet people's parents and grandparents. I mean, some of what people went through and the '50s and '60s
6:48 there was just awful. And, you know,
6:57 it really changed, you know, 1978 after Mao Zedong passed away, the new leadership changed and it became a much more capitalist kind of a place. And in the course of just a single generation,
7:10 very little at home to bikes to refrigerators to washing machines to cars in one generation. And so in many ways, there were aspects of life that felt very familiar. Look, I do think that people
7:24 who are leading the place
7:28 have different goals than the United States. I think that's real. I think some of it is a different viewpoint of the world. I think some of it is just classic sticking to power. A lot of people
7:41 there, at least conceptually people in China think of themselves as almost 2, 000-year-old country. If you study a lot of Chinese history, something that jumps out is whenever there's changes of
7:54 power, a lot of people die on the Vassawai. I think some of it actually just comes from a desire to stay in power in a fear of what happens if they don't. I think, unfortunately, We're on
8:09 somewhat of a collision course, but my two anecdotal opposite ends of the spectrum is it felt like kind of post Tiananmen Square that the Chinese government did become more responsive to the people.
8:25 I mean, you had earthquakes happen and there was actually some level of, what I would say, is care in terms of looking out for people and not necessarily as calluses, maybe previous governments
8:39 would have been. Just a sense from kind of watching from Houston, Texas. The other end of the spectrum is my oldest daughter, blonde hair, blue eyes. Whenever she would gather, people would
8:53 follow around. Oh yeah, take photos. Take photos. And constantly had people in black suits with a black tie taking pictures of her following her around. Yeah. So, Yeah, it's um
9:11 I mean, there's over a billion people who live there. And if you're in the cities, you see foreigners, but otherwise it's kind of rare. And maybe when she was in Beijing or Shanghai or wherever
9:22 she was,
9:25 there might have been millions of people there who were visiting for the first time. It was the one trip they'd take in their life to a major city. And so it was very surprising to see someone like
9:36 your daughter there and - She wound up getting a black ski cap put on - Just to cover it up and tuck in her hair up, underneath it just to avoid that. The other thing that was interesting is, she
9:42 said there were days she couldn't breathe. Just the smoke, the cold, et cetera, was that bad. What years was she there? Gosh, let's say 10 years ago So let's kind of put a 2000.
10:07 14 to 16, she's my child that dropped out of high school after her sophomore year and went straight to college. No kidding. Yeah, she, well, on one of the, so she's 22 now, she graduated
10:21 college when she was 20, so she went to college when she was 16. One of the reasons she went to college when she was 16 is she got caught drinking on the trip to China. Fair enough. Yeah, I get
10:34 the phone call from the principal of the school I think there's a path forward for Charlie remaining in school. I'm like, Oh God, where's this going? Oh no. Yeah. Got to remember picking her up
10:45 from the airport. What the fuck were you thinking? Totally. Yeah. And her great line was, Well, Dad, you know, it's not like they don't really enforce the law over there. I'm like, Sweetie,
10:58 you are the blonde hair blue eyes personthat would love to lock up forever. For sure, for sure. Come on. Yeah, but she, it's this really, it's kind of hard to explain if you haven't been there,
11:14 right? 'Cause like from the outside and it seems like this intense kind of communist place that they're working nine, nine, you know, nine, nine, six, nine am to nine pm, six days a week,
11:24 you know, in a kind of state centered thing.
11:29 But I mean, if you were there when your daughter was there, I mean, it just seemed like at the time it was inevitable that it was going to become kind of westernized, pro-democracy, it
11:40 was just kind of going that way.
11:43 In many ways,
11:47 it was incredibly safe and it actually felt more capitalist in many ways than the US. can than the US. did, you know, if companies, you know, which are arms of the government want to go and,
11:58 you know, build a new power plant, reroute traffic, build a new part of town it do money and everybody move can they, could buy anything.
12:06 at the time, and so I think there were a lot of people in Westerners who felt it wasn't such a big deal to be slightly outside of what the law said because money kind of spoke. And I think that what
12:22 happened over the next few years surprised a lot of people who lived there.
12:29 I mean, to kind of almost set the stage, like I think probably in 2012, 2013, there was probably 100, 000-plus Americans at any given time studying there. Now it's on the order to one to 2, 000.
12:41 It's really shifted. But the, you know, I think Xi Jinping came to power.
12:50 People knew that he was gonna be a bit more traditional, but his daughter went to Harvard, you know, the sons and daughters. To know her. I did know her. You all overlapped? Well, she's a few
13:01 years younger than me, But it was this funny thing where I think Harvard took - four to nine students per year from China. Everyone knew Seijimping's daughter was at college. So that narrowed it
13:14 down to about four people. And then if the next people say, Well, I'm not Seijimping's daughter. I'm not Seijimping's daughter. You're not Seijimping's daughter.
13:23 And so she was under an assumed name at the time, but look, it was very natural and easy to think. It would. Okay, so I'm going through my head. Do you ask her out on a date or not? No, you
13:34 know what I mean? Very dangerous, yeah. Like half of me goes dangerous, but man, if I'm the son-in-law, I look like a king. I don't know. I'd have to think about that one. I wouldn't flirt
13:48 with her. Yeah, it would be my intentions are honorable. That's right. Pure courting, yeah. That's right, best behavior for sure, but it just happened in ways. Yeah. You know, she came back,
14:02 you know, diplomats and officials had a few years to come back. And, you know, and I think probably nobody now feels that China is going to become a democracy, but probably 2014, 2016, that
14:19 seemed like the way it was going. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, we let them into the world trade organizations, et cetera, all that, all that stuff, thinking that it would work. Because I mean,
14:29 if you look back at history, you know, the Republican Party here in America will sit there and say, Ronald Reagan was the greatest figure ever. And, you know, he won the Cold War. And there's
14:41 probably an element of truth to that. But I mean, at the end of the day, what really potentially won the Cold War buys Coca-Cola TV. Totally. You know, I mean, totally. Yeah. Yeah. No, I
14:54 mean, at the end of the day, everybody, you know, every 18-year-old on the It just wants to wear a pair of Levi's, you know, 100 and have a car to be able to take the head cheerleader out on a
15:04 date It's so I mean it's a culture is I mean There's no other country in the in the world that has that has Hollywood, you know that has coca-cola That has I think everybody kind of wanted to you
15:18 know be American and it's still I think in many ways one of the US's most powerful Exports some such as culture or maybe you can call it technology now, too. Um, but uh, yeah I think you're right.
15:32 It changed a lot of things. Yeah, all right. So speaking of tech Drill down on the ramp in terms of what y'all actually do and I will just to level set. Yeah, sure. I spent one summer Uh in
15:46 between first and second year business school an auditor aturnston yon. Okay, and
15:52 we had paper ledgers Yeah, we would write notes on and we have colored pencils and we would
15:57 draw And so I'm sure you're doing much better with financial systems than those days. But what does ramp do? It's come a long way. I mean, like, so if you almost think about kind of the journey
16:12 that financial services has been on for a long time, probably one of the
16:18 first obvious differences between a ramp and let's say an American Express or a Concur, you know, if you're like someone working at most companies, you're familiar with expense reports It used to
16:27 be kind of, you know, you'd buy something, pen and paper receipt, you'd deal with it, then it became, it went to the cloud, you could use expense if I or Concur, buy something and you would
16:36 detail and key in what you bought. I still remember the white sheets of paper with the receipts taped to them that had to be, ultimately we got high tech and we scanned them. Oh, sure, yeah,
16:50 yeah.
16:52 Now, if you imagine the next logical progression, that sort of our flagship product. Your expense. policies embedded into cards, so we issue smart cards out to companies. Companies can issue
17:04 physical, virtual cards, whatever they want with their expense policies to anyone at the company. Employees can use the cards to buy what they need, and then ramp automates the expense reports.
17:15 We can pull receipts from an email. We can pull receipts from a vendor or we can text you in the receipts in your hand. So we take what's often a, it's the worst hour at the end of every month for
17:25 people to go tag the receipts, scan it, tell what you bought to. That's done by a computer. We really automatically do the expense reports for you. And that's what we started with back in
17:38 2020. You know, we're, and he probably now about one to one to 2 of all corporate and small business card spend in the US. And so it's grown really quickly through being a better way. But it's
17:49 grown into, we process bill payments for companies. So let's say you're 1 or 10s or 1000s of invoices on behalf of a company or procurement purchases, and effectively we not only process the
18:05 purchases but take the receipts, the invoices, structure the data and do companies books for them, kind of detail what the purchases were. And so that usually the reason that people are buying the
18:18 software is it's often replacing what feels like a lot of different tools, maybe an American Express or a billcom or
18:27 a Koopa and concur in trying to stitch all these together to it's one simple tool that you can use to manage all the spend that you're making for a company.
18:38 And that's kind of the premise. So
18:42 I'm the CFO. What happens? Am I paying for software then or am I paying for transaction? Yeah What kind of ROIs do I get on my spend? Yeah, I'll start with that. So we did a study a couple of
18:56 months ago with Forester, and we helped the average company using RAMP cut their expenses. There are card expenses by about 5 per year. There's a few components. Some of this is a strange way to
19:10 think about it is,
19:12 most people are functionally paid by RAMP to use it. We give you one and a half percent cashback on your purchases. You pay it off every 30 days We include software for expense management bill
19:24 payments, and so you can, instead of needing to go buy, concur, or expenseify other kind of tools you pay for by seat and by month, that's all kind of included and embedded.
19:35 We facilitate payments for you, and then on top of it, we do two things. One, we create software that shows you ways to spend less on things you're buying. So let's say that you buy a bunch of
19:47 Salesforce licenses, or licenses to Zoom, something like that. can do things like upload a contract and we'll show you almost like what Zillow does for buying home. Here's what we estimate your
19:59 home is worth. We can show you here's the rate you were quoted. Here's what the rest of the market is paying. So it helps people negotiate for lower rates down. Let's say you then get a great rate
20:10 on sale of course you buy it. We can then show you a couple months into it. You're paying for 30 seats but only 20 people are logging in regularly So when I got when I got fired I had tons of time
20:21 on my hand right. One of the things up. So I got fired and when I had a lot of time in two I was poor. I wasn't rich anymore. So so I was sitting there going through my American Express card bill.
20:35 Yeah. I mean I just paid it at the end of the month right. Totally. So I'm going through it. Turns out nine different Netflix accounts So and I'm like, what the hell? How did that happen yet?
20:47 So the kids would forget the password and they'd set up a new, uh, and account on Netflix and they forget to cancel it, right? I was paying for three subscriptions to the economist, 12 Hulu
21:01 accounts, go through all of this sort of stuff and sounds like if I had to have ramp. Yeah. If I'd had personal ramp, I would have known that. That's, I mean, like, to be honest, like you hit
21:13 it a lot of what we do. I mean, I mean, you'd think your kids would be, you know, looking out, it'd be more helpful But companies are crazier in some cases, right? 'Cause like you have, you
21:25 know, tens to hundreds of salespeople, people the on working, operating business. You have someone working in finance who gets all the bills but has little context and invoices and, you know,
21:38 seeing nine Netflix subscriptions, if they're, you know, in finance, maybe they'll notice that's the same manner, you don't need so many. But we've seen companies that are paying for, I think
21:49 probably the worst, 10 sets of product management software. you know, Asana, base, you know, Basecamp, Trello, Jira, linear things, all these competing sets of tools were the engineers tried
22:01 one set of software, salespeople tried another, project management tried another, they picked a one or two or three that they wanted and they're still paying for the rest. And so this kind of
22:10 stuff happens actually all the time. Yeah. And so we can show that to people. And I don't know if the company version of this happens, but you know, Planet Fitness. Yeah. I think you wind up
22:24 with like 20 of those subscription, dry it 'cause you get your stay in a hotel somewhere and the gym's like 30 bucks at the hotel. And you're like, man, I'll just go to the Planet Fitness across
22:33 the street 'cause it's 10 bucks. You sign up and then you forget to cancel. And then you do it again and again and yeah. And then they make it impossible to cancel too. Right. And so this is also
22:43 one of the favorite things. So we actually issue Ramp Visa credit cards and
22:51 Because we're creating the technology, we're processing, approving, or denying the charges in real times, you can actually build interesting out ons. So you can do things like say this card
23:01 that's in your wallet or in whoever you want in your company's wallet. You can say this works everywhere, except for Planet Fitness. Nice. So even if they get your number, they can't actually
23:13 charge it. So you can surgically turn merchants off or you can do the universe. So let's say that you have a vendor as you do a lot of business with. Maybe it's a large ads account and you wanna
23:27 make it such that only Google ads, if you're running ads, maybe you wanna high limit 50, 100, 000 million limit, but only Google can use that card. And so we actually create the abilities for
23:40 companies to have much more surgical control over the physical and virtual cars they issue out. So those types of things And then I think like the last - place where, and this is increasingly where
23:53 a lot of the world is going, where we're saving a ton of time is, or creating a lot of value is just time automation, you know, instead of it being it's an hour at the end of every month, you're
24:05 doing expenses, it's being done in real time. It's a lot faster and easier. So we can shave an hour off for every employee to, you know, now we've seen so much transactional data, how so many
24:17 companies have said sales force should this category in our general ledger. This vendor should be this category. This partner, you know, who we've been doing business with for 20 years is always
24:29 going to hit this. Ramp is able to predict, almost think of it as auto-complete for your accounting records, where everything goes. And so the job at the end of the month for someone here in St.
24:41 Young or an outside accounting firm is not okay a long list of transactions. Let me tag this, tag that. stroke building automations to, it's more one of review. And
24:54 so it gives, I would say for most finance teams, it's because there's so many point solutions, it's become a very tedious job for people over the past 20 years. We automate a lot of that away. So
25:06 we think and hope they can work on much more strategic and interesting tasks like not how do I label this transaction, but instead where are we creating value of the business where are we just like
25:16 burning money? How much of the way, 'cause one of the things I've noticed in my career, and I'm a bit of a lot, I still do things on paper around here, but the kids around here are always like,
25:28 oh, there'd be so much more efficient. You do this in notion, not for me. So I get babysat around here. But one of the things, it sounds like you built a really, really cool toy. How much in
25:39 the way do you have to do a training company? So they'll actually, I mean, is that a hard problem?
25:48 Or is it better these days because people are just young and they're used to doing everything on their phone? I mean, I think, I mean, when I think about just like business-to-business software,
25:58 generally, B2B tools, it's been in this funniest place because like, I think over the past 20 years, you know, people, even people who work at big companies, they're consumers too. You go home,
26:10 you put, you wear anicky shoes, use Instagram, Shopify, these like beautifully well-designed, intuitive, you never had to learn how to use Instagram or Facebook or Spotify. It's just kind of
26:21 easy, obvious and self-serve. And so we've tried to bring that to the expense side of things too. And so we pride ourselves off of, I think in our industry, we're known as like the easiest to use
26:34 software.
26:37 For most companies, it actually takes about an hour to get set up, issue new cards, switch over vendors, and you're done. I mean, I think if you have a super large company,
26:50 Like Airbnb, they had 10, 000 people switch over. That took a little bit of training 'cause we were turning things off. But for most people, it's, there's no training. It's actually just pretty
26:56 intuitive. And you tap a card and you get a text message and snap a photo of the receipt in your hand and that's it. And so there's just so much automation to kind of take care of this stuff. I
27:07 guess, I guess you're right. I mean, I've learned how to use my Morgan Stanley app. Yeah. And yeah.
27:14 So maybe it is easier It's, we always try to be and keep it pretty intuitive. And you're right. Like there's some new technology mentioned, notion and chat with you where you're like, you need to
27:28 change how you work and work in this new and different way. And I don't really believe in that. I kind of believe it needs to be dead simple tools. Or, you know, it's just what's the next thing
27:40 and you're done and taking steps away. And I'm sure there's people who know how to change behavior. I don't know how to do it Yeah. Automate things. Yeah, it's going to be fun watching you come
27:52 into energy because here's kind of my take on the energy business. Yeah, talk to me. This is the, so we're a lottery ticket business, right? Because if you think about it, through no work on
28:05 your part, you can get rich overnight. The Saudis embargo oil and oil prices triple, I'm rich. I'm randomly drilling a well out here and I hit something. I had no idea it was there I am rich.
28:19 And so anything that allows you to have another lottery ticket, we are so good at. I mean, the highest tech thing on the planet is you go out to Exxon right now, you can go into the room where
28:32 they're literally geo-steering, drilling an offshore well down in Ghana. Right? Yeah. I mean, that's as high tech as it comes. I'll put anything that Silicon Valley is doing up against that.
28:47 They probably still have paper ledgers there because paper ledgers, if you automate them, they save nickel and dimes. They don't give you a lottery ticket. Because when times are really bad, when
28:59 oil prices are really low, you don't have the cash to automate things and do nickels and dimes sort of stuff. That's going to be what you're going to be up against when you start messing around with
29:12 energy companies is you've got to convince somebody who just gets rich through no fault of their own that they can worry about nickels and dimes. Now I think the thing you have going for you and why
29:23 maybe that's changed is37 oil. We had a good run of really low prices where I was like, oh crap, stuff actually matters. And then I think old guys like me are just dying,
29:41 you know, the crew changes happening, You know, the crew change is happening, but it's, it's a weird dynamic to go. to go selling to. So it'll be interesting like in six months or a year if we
29:50 do this again, to hear what you're seeing on that front. And I may just be tidally off base, but that's at least my take on it. It's been,
30:00 the more like ramp has grown, I've tried to get deeper in the world, but I've been trying to read and get close with. I don't know, people who've built amazing businesses over the years, and I
30:13 was struck. I'm
30:17 reading and listening to
30:20 stories about John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, a lot of these old industrial energy titans you name it, and this theme kept coming up over and over, which is that revenue and economic cycles are
30:36 cyclical, but cost structures are fixed
30:41 and they've They made their businesses and some others, if their competitors lost their shirts.
30:50 Obviously everyone did great in the boom times, but bus cycles were real. It happened consistently and you could bet on it if you waited over 10 to 10 years. And at least, I don't know if they're
31:03 right, but at least they liked to think and express it
31:07 that their kind of control over costs of making sure nothing was wasted is what allowed them to get through some of the boss. And I think for us, like you're right, like there's no aspect
31:29 of ramps business today, which is focused on helping businesses drive revenue or growth or any of that kind of things. But we do try to obsess on
31:35 for anyone who's buying ramp and using it, we wanna pay you to use it We want the ROI to be clear as day. to be a tool to cut costs to make sure there's any waste kind of going out
31:48 because you're right, you know, whoever was on that plot of land before the well was struck probably really regressed that holding on to it. And so, you know, we have to figure it out. I don't
31:59 know. Like, what advice would you give as you kind of think about,
32:04 you know, people like me who, you know, understand we do business with folks in the energy sector and field, but I wouldn't say I'm a native around it and trying to learn. What's your crash
32:17 course? How do you, what do you think I should? Oh my gosh, I can take that. I can take that anyway. No, I think I think one of the things you'll find about the energy business that may be
32:28 different than other ones and Houston is kind of the hub of it. So, I think you'll get this vibe being here is we honestly don't have a class structure. You know, other cities you go to, it
32:41 matters
32:48 Father was, I heard something last weekend about Houston that I think summarizes this. Houston's where you don't have to wait in line. It's cool. Yeah, and that's cool. And why that is, is
32:56 because if you think about the energy business, you basically take all your money, you drill a well, and then you turn it on and see what you've got, right? And you sit there and you look up and
33:06 go, oh, that really sucked, I'm broke. Or, you know, wow, I'm rich And so what'll happen is the CEO of an oil and gas company's best friend is inevitably the janitor. Yeah. And when times are
33:18 going great, CEO's got a private plane, he's flying around, you know, he and the janitor flying around going to see Metallica, you know, in concert 'cause they want to. And then when times are
33:30 bad, CEO's sleeping on the janitor's couch. And that's just how it is. And he or she's gonna go start another oil and gas company And I'll, and so you get this just kind of. crazy. Kind of no
33:44 one no one can be better than anyone else here. It's like we've all been broke. Yeah. And all those I mean, I was very publicly fired and mocked and humiliated on Twitter for it. Yeah, whatever.
33:55 That was Monday. You know, so so one of those things. So you'll very much have that vibe when you when you come here. The other thing I'll I'll I'll make fun of Colin for this column, McClellan.
34:08 Yeah. See, digital wildcatters. You know, Colin likes to talk about how great venture is, you know, and entrepreneurial it is and private equity and energy is all stuffy and and sort of stuff.
34:22 And I remember one time we were talking something I go, dude, I got a hundred million dollar check for acreage. And then we go drill a well, that's pretty freaking entrepreneurial, man. I mean,
34:33 if you want to get so you'll you'll have a you'll have just wild-eyed optimists here, very entrepreneurial people, everyone's down the earth. you'll literally be able to get into anyone's office
34:44 you want. Wow. And yeah, which is kind of crazy. So you don't have to worry about, you know, my dad's here, I'm a member of this country club or whatever, it's just Houston. So that'll be
34:56 cool. It's, you know, I am,
35:01 it's funny, I mean, growing up in Las Vegas, I remember as a kid thinking the building was 20 years old, I was about as old as it could be. I know, I know. You know, it just felt ancient And I.
35:12 We do that in Houston too. If a building's been around 25 years, we just tear it down and build a new one. Tear it down. Yeah, it's, you gotta get rid of it. I mean, I think there's something
35:21 just like refreshing and different and I don't, to be honest with you, I didn't really appreciate it or understand how weird that world view was until you like go to Boston and people are wondering
35:32 where your, you know, Grand Grand Grand parents sat on the Mayflower break. That's exactly what side of Capitol Street do you live on? Exactly, yeah. It's like, yeah. crazy. Exactly. I think
35:44 definitely the East Coast very much has that. I think there are definitely elements of that sort of on the West Coast. I mean, obviously Silicon Valley is very entrepreneurial, but there's a
35:59 little bit of a class structure there, I think. Yeah, I agree with you. I jokingly think I have more in common with the Australians I hung out with this summer than I do. My two coasts here. But
36:13 yeah, that's the vibe you'll definitely get from from Texas. So it'll be interesting. So, okay, so we do this podcast again in like five years. Tell me what we'll be talking about in five years
36:32 that no one's talking about now. And maybe that stuff that keeps you up at night, Maybe that stuff you think you're going to be pushing into. And I'll even go first on this so you can think a
36:44 little bit. It's interesting. I tell everybody, if you're not screwing around at a minimum with chat, GPT or Grock or one of these things, you're gonna be left behind. It's crazy. It really is,
36:54 you know, we're gonna overestimate the potential in the short term like we do with every technology, but we underestimate the technology over the long term. Yeah. It's really gonna be a game
37:06 changer there. Chuck, how are you using it? So actually, this is the wildest thing. So here at Digital Wildcatters, we've been podcast bros and we wear our hats backwards and stuff and we've
37:19 literally taken all our energy content, trained in energy language model on it. Now we're building AI apps for software companies. Okay. Oh, it's crazy. No kidding, okay. Yeah, we've got an
37:31 installation at NOV. We've got an installation over at
37:36 ProFract. I had the head of AI for Intel on my podcast we were sent around. and we were talking about rag models and all this. Yeah. Great dude, but after the podcast, he's like, how do you
37:47 know about a rag model? We didn't know that anybody outside of Silicon Valley knew about it. And so it's kind of wild. We've been doing some bleeding edge stuff around here. So the running joke is
37:58 I talk old guy. So anytime we're going to meet with a company, it's Colin will go find the champion within the organization that's usually a 32 year old production engineer or something like that
38:10 And then I got to go talk to the old CEO guy and say, this is going to be okay. Trust me, your data staying on your computer. Exactly. And I think what we've seen, at least in energy, what
38:23 we've seen is the use case that gets paid for a day, it's just really advanced search. Like our installation, one of our installation that's in, We've got 20, 000 documents that have to do safely.
38:41 stuff. And safety is just the most massive jingo puzzle on the planet, you know, because if this part comes out and it's too old, then it's got to be replaced by that. And if you do that, then
38:51 you have to do this. And that would take engineers like literally a week to go figure out all that stuff. Well, the AI model can do it in 30 seconds. Totally. And the other big important thing
39:02 we're seeing too is you got to show your work on that, so that's not a good check it, because they're not going to trust your answer. So I think that's the use case we're seeing is just being able
39:13 to search data and kind of have simple to put in effect. Own personal use. I use perplexity a lot. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you had asked me a year ago, Google's the greatest website and I'm
39:29 like, Google sucks. It's not good. Yeah. Compared to perplexity. So yeah,
39:36 you were getting perplexity last night. Who's this dude?
39:38 Oh, yeah. It's covered on the bod gas. You know, likewise, but I feel like I know you 'cause perplexity works quite well, like, it's up. No, you're totally right, right? I am, 'cause I
39:49 gave you my funny kind of backstory on some of this and I'll go into the question of what's gonna be super different in five years, but my, so ramp is the second startup that I worked on. The first
40:01 one,
40:03 we started it in 2014, so about a decade ago, and I really think it probably was an AI agent company. Okay. The premise of it was pretty simple and I'll describe it. So the idea was, let's say
40:15 that you bought a TV at Best Buy, something like that online. And the next week after you buy it, it goes on sale. You know, Best Buy would guarantee you could get that100 back or whatever the
40:25 price difference was if you asked them. So we built it was an app that automatically got it for you. So you installed it in your Gmail or Yahoo or whatever. I remember the commercial, the little
40:36 kid walks in with the ad and says, I just saw this and the guy gives him the money. And there you go. So it was an AI agent that did it. So you would basically like sign up, you would link your
40:45 Gmail account and that was it. Okay, so it was called Paribus and it would go, you know, check for purchases from stores that it worked with.
40:57 We would then structure the information and see, okay, check bot, this TV at Best Buy, it's1, 000, check the website every day. If the price dropped and you were eligible for a refund and it
41:09 structured the policy, we would write an email as you to Best Buy asking for100 back and you would wake up the next day and look in your email and you'd see a response from Best Buy saying you've
41:20 been refunded for100 and we charged a cut. So it was actually this kind of simple agent-based model They don't have kind of a simple set of duties. And we launched this thing within a year. We had
41:34 almost a million people using it. And we filed for price drop refunds for late shipment guarantee refunds, all kinds of stuff. And it worked in its scale well.
41:47 We ended up selling it to Capital One. It's still there. We kind of talk about it, but it's been funny living now in 10 years later, 2024. And people are talking about kind of AI agents as this
42:00 new form of technology that is going to become very present. Maybe you'll have AI lawyers, people, digital lawyers that
42:10 will be fiduciaries to you and represent you digitally. AI accountants, AI salespeople. These are all things that people in the valley and the technology industry are working really hard on. I
42:24 think Microsoft had their big release today It's not supposed to be a co-pilot, but actually be an agent for you and - Skippy 20. Exactly, whatever they've been off call this back. It's, you know,
42:35 we'll see if it works or not, but a lot of smart people think so. And I think that where people's minds are in Silicon Valley, I think truly is, you know, software in some senses is writing these
42:53 kind of custom workflows, getting someone to pay you15, 20, 100 per month or whatever in someone is doing the work. And I think what a lot of people are trying to figure out is, can we sell work?
43:05 Can you actually sell the outcome that people are trying to drive?
43:12 And it's interesting, I think in some sense, it's always been somewhat possible. You know, it wasn't really a job to be filing for price drop refunds. It's too narrow, it's too specific. But
43:22 suddenly if intelligence is getting cheaper and cheaper, they're actual. um, functions in parts of companies that you might be able to sell, uh, not just the hourly rate, but the actual outcome.
43:33 And so I think that probably in some sense, if we're, uh, back in Houston, five years later, um, talking about it, if people are correct, um, that the addressable market for software, uh,
43:48 isn't just workflows, but actually the selling of work, um, I think we're going to be running out of energy to power that. Give me, give me an example. Yeah. What would be an example of maybe a
44:00 work that might be sold in five years. So, um, you know, we had talked kind of off, off mic at the beginning, um, but there's a lot of people probably in some sense, um, advice five years ago,
44:13 um, would have been, if you want a job that you're always going to be safe in the future, you should be a software engineer, And in a strange way, people are wondering, is that going to be the
44:23 first automated job? because if you're a software engineer, all your work is fully digital. All of it, there's inputs and outputs that are affected, and there's a lot of very popular companies.
44:36 Probably the fastest growing
44:40 app that we see customers paying for now is going to be called Cursor, which is infrastructure for software engineers to ship code faster. It's basically autocomplete for code. The short-term view
44:53 is that it helps engineers be two, three, five, 10 times as productive. You can write a lot more code and ship a lot more apps, which is really good. There are also companies like DevIn and
45:05 Cognition and Factory AI and others where
45:11 people are trying to create digital software engineers and so you can actually just say, I like to build an iPhone app. Here are some of the functions that I wanted to have and go create and just
45:23 like a person would have. It's basically a large language model has access to an internet browser, a code editor, access to,
45:32 you know, shell and to kind of your code base. So it's building repos, yeah. I think, I think it was BP announced that they had, they're the developer by 70. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing that,
45:46 that happened today. Yeah, it's this funny thing where, you know, history, the question is do things behave the same as they used to. If you look like 30 years ago, when things were machine
45:58 code and it was very hard to do the number of software developers is maybe the size of a, you know, 1, 300th of what it is now. Things get more abstract, you're not kind of writing and
46:09 engineering right to the hardware, you're building software on top of it. It means that, you know, you need to write less code in order to do more things. In a strange way, it increased the
46:20 demand for software The positive view of the story is, hey, if it gets easier to code, everyone can code. And there's going to be more coders than ever. And we're going to build more and more
46:29 software sooner and faster. And I actually believe that over the next probably two to five years, there is some question of if reasoning continues to get better and better at the speed that it is.
46:44 At some point, I mean, maybe it's a novelty. People can code and create different things. But I think there's some people wondering, will software engineering actually be the first job that is
46:55 automated, where it's sort of
46:60 considered artisanals? Is there something in language models that led it to be so effective at software coding? Or is it just it had stack overflow to train on? And so that's kind of what you fed
47:16 it to train. And look at that, it got really good at it It's um, I think you nailed it, right? like I think in some sense,
47:25 the connection between input and output is so tight and it's all digital and modelable. I think the fun for a lot of software engineers is you, you know, you're writing code, it doesn't work, it
47:37 doesn't work and then you change one thing and suddenly it works. The code runs and you feel kind of a rush and then you move on to the next line and go through that. In some sense, that's, you're
47:47 getting that feedback loop right away that it's working And so
47:52 with a fully digital job like that, it's all digital. And so you can see the feedback loops model it and create it. And so you can have kind of a digital version, you know, a great model of what
48:05 that world looks like. Whereas you look at physical robots, things today, where on paper a design can look really good, but you know, you know, it doesn't balance, things happen, falls over
48:19 And so.
48:21 Uh, in some sense, it, it almost implies that these truly very digital jobs. So maybe the first, um, you know, are more automatable and maybe the, um, you know, the hard physical labor jobs,
48:37 um, uh, plumbing, electricity or oil out of the ground actually might be the, you know, the safest and in some sense automation This is one other thing I got to warn you about in the energy
48:50 business, um, everybody in the energy business has made a million dollars because they had a bit of information that nobody else had and they traded on it somehow, whether that was, you know, I
49:03 know there's something here and I was able to buy this lease before my neighbor found out whatever. And then if you look, we have all pissed away at least 10 to 15 times that amount of money.
49:19 because we didn't collaborate with our neighbor. And the big thing in the Shell Revolution has been figuring out how to space the well. So if you've got this area to drill, to put eight wells in it,
49:31 to only put six wells, 'cause there's all this science that goes into draining it. And as weird as it sounds, in some places, 'cause of the dynamics of the reservoir, it's not as simple as just,
49:45 these are straws and a milkshake. And if I put too many straws in, I just spent too much money. And so maybe my economics are not good. Sometimes if you put too many straws in the milkshake, you
49:54 can't get the milkshake out. So this was big, and wells get expensive. I mean, you're drilling a 10 million dollar wall. You could put eight of them in the space. And so we spent two or three
50:05 years just screwing up, spending so much money, losing so much money, 'cause we all just wouldn't sit down and talk and go, Hey, why don't we all just run, this one test right here. Well, I'll
50:17 kick your little money, we'll see how it works. And then, you know, instead of us all doing it independently. So there's this weird element of secrecy and, you know, hiding cards and, you know,
50:32 playing poker that just doesn't exist. And you're going to find that odd. Cause like on Stack Overflow, a Google engineer ago, Hey, I'm having problems on Microsoft Go. Oh, I wrote some code.
50:42 Does this help you? Totally. Thanks, John Yeah, yeah. And energy just doesn't have that vibe yet. And so you're going to find that weird. Like we'll get a beer after you've called us and energy
50:53 govities, you'll be gone. And that was so weird. Yeah. It's like a holy guy. It's got freaking credit cards and,
50:60 you know, there's no competitive advantage in that. So yeah, but anyway, there's another thing you're going to look forward to in Houston. It's so many different ways doing business for sure. I
51:13 don't know. So do this real quick, we'll wrap up, 'cause I know you have better things to do to talk to me and you're very cool to come on though, but. No, this is incredible, yeah. But, all
51:23 right, so everybody in the energy business wants to be an entrepreneur. They all want to start their own company. Give some advice. 'Cause now you're on number two. Yeah. And things people would
51:36 love to hear about, what do they need to know about when it comes to fundraising? What do they need to know about actually starting a company? All that stuff. Oh my gosh. I mean, so I'll give a
51:47 couple of things. I mean, one, I think a lot of people's sense about fundraising is like, I always love watching Shark Tank as much as anybody where, you know, you come onto the show, you're
51:59 pitching and you say with this round of financing, I'll then be able to go on to the next step and go build this business. Would you please invest? And on TV, it happens sometimes and in reality,
52:12 you almost wanna do the exact opposite. Um, I, um, I don't know if Peter Thiel ever really said it, but I, I always, I always overheard this story of, uh, he thought Airbnb was this perfect
52:23 investment. Um, and the reason was, uh, they didn't need his help at all. Uh, they didn't need the money. Um, the business would grow whether or not he was involved. Um, and, um, you know,
52:38 they wanted to have an investment. He was happy to do it. And I'm sure there was more to it than that I'm sure there was, uh, uses of the capital, all those things. They would have to kind of go
52:46 and invest. But I actually think it's kind of a, uh, a great metaphor for what, uh, raising venture is really like, um, um, by the time you're pitching investors. Yeah. Oh, it's totally a,
52:57 I tell everybody, it's a junior high dance. Well, when one girl wants to dance with you, they all want to dance with you. They all want to dance with you. It's that one girl. Yeah. You,
53:05 you've got to get the one girl willing to dance with you. Yeah. That's it And so no weird way, my advice for raising money is just build a good business that doesn't need it. You don't want to own
53:15 it, it doesn't need it. You know, but there's more interesting ways. I mean, I think what, in my first business, there were a lot of things that were great and things I would never do again.
53:29 Like with the very first business, you're terrified you're going to run out of money at all times. In the good parts of that, as you learn the value of a dollar of an hour, you try to learn how to
53:39 be kind of spendthrift and kind of spend things in ways where they're really useful. But when I look back after selling our first company and I actually looked at like who made the thing really
53:51 valuable,
53:54 it wasn't the people that I hired for, you know, closer to minimum wage or kind of just getting going, it was actually the really expensive hires. It was like the people I was nervous to hire,
54:04 they were higher up on the payroll, more equity that we kind of gave away. in a strange way, kind of the most valuable, the most expensive people are the most valuable. They're the highest kind
54:15 of ROI. And so probably the thing that I would say is important for anyone who's trying to hire and build and put together some company that other people want to invest in. Almost think about it as
54:28 like you're, you know, first trying to produce a movie. Before people made kind of mission impossible, you shoot a trailer, you get like the right people. Sure, it would have been good with
54:38 certain actors, but it's better with Tom Cruise, I guess. Or, you know, kind of different people you want to think about, like who you need, ideally, for the movie. How do you pull people
54:46 together? And then when you're hiring, you know, if you kind of hire from the general job market, you know, you put out an ad, it's tough, you know. You can interview people for eight hours.
54:57 You don't really know if they're good or not. Eight hours is a lot. Within two days of working with a person, you're going to have more experience actually working with them than you had over the
55:05 course of the interview. And probably the best way to actually hire And, um,
55:10 have some unfair advantages, pick people who are way better than what people think, or you know something the market does and is actually invest in long-term relationships before you're hiring
55:19 people. Go back to people you've worked with for years, known for years, went to school with, college with, that kind of stuff. It's not like the proper way to hire where you kind of open a post
55:30 and try to meet everybody, but you'll have a lot more information and can figure out who's a lot better than maybe what the market values them at So are you can start putting together a good team?
55:41 That was interesting. So I went to Rice University and we just historically always sucked up at athletics, right? I mean, football team was horrible, et cetera. We got really good though for a
55:53 long while in baseball. And that was all because we hired Wayne Graham and Wayne Graham's thesis on how to deal with his team, do you ride the ass of your superstars? because he always said, you
56:09 know, some guy that's. just kind of okay, he's trying as hard as he can because he's gonna get cut from the team and I won't give it a second thought. The superstar, even getting 5 more out of
56:22 the superstar and staying on him is material to the team. You know, it makes the team that much better. So to your point, go get your superstars and that's where the ROI is. Yeah, I think so for
56:35 sure. And also I think it's one of those things too where like the superstars like pushing it and giving it their all. And like, you know, I think people who are on the team kind of want to rise
56:45 to it, you know, stay on the team and I agree. And the last thing I'll say, I actually don't know if it's applicable. Now I'm thinking about the story that you tell me about the way that Houston
56:56 operates, but at least in the Valley, this is interesting. I would say that it was as funny saying of, you know, if you go to somebody and you ask them for money, you're gonna get advice.
57:10 And if you go and ask for advice, like maybe, maybe, maybe you'll get money at the end of it. When we were building ramp, you know, put together the team and going, we just simply say, hey,
57:21 here's what we're trying to do. We're
57:24 working on a card that's designed to help businesses spend less money and spend less time, not more. We know a couple things about saving.
57:34 This was our last business that we built on it. Are there places in your business you feel like you're spending too much money or time? We try to flip around and sit on the same side of the table
57:44 and solve a problem together and walk people through our progress and ask them for help on things. People said, Thanks, get out of my office. Other people said, Here's where I'm spending too much
57:54 money or time. If you solve this, I'd look at it and call me back in a month. Let me know where you go and just keep calling them back. I'm not asking them for anything. Just giving them updates
58:03 and whatever Yeah. Uh, one data point becomes two becomes three and suddenly, you know, uh, two points is aligned, three is a curve, um, and it's kind of going up into the right set of speak.
58:17 And before you know it, um, you know, all investors, often they have partners too. They have people they want to look smart in front of, um, and, uh, maybe you get your first bite. Someone
58:28 says, this is really interesting. I'd love to get involved, kind of put some money to work and, you know, you kind of figured out a little bit and you can call up with other people you're in
58:35 touch with and say, you know, um, no pressure, but, um, we're thinking about taking some capital. It's looking like it's, it's here. We'd love to have you if you want or if not, no stress
58:45 and, um, it's a lot more like dating. Yeah. Fundraising is, I, you know, it's a junior high dance. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, cause. So basically, you know, I get, I get booted
58:58 and I start a podcast because I like to hear myself speak, right? Yeah. So I started doing that and, you know, I also, yeah This was great, I had a buddy when I got. fired
59:08 and he goes, I don't want you to do anything for six months. I'm like, well, oil's at minus 37. I don't think there's a worry of that, but okay. And he said, no, anytime you think of
59:17 something, just text me and I'll accumulate all these and we'll go get a beer, you know, and we'll go through all of them. And supposedly the first thing I ever texted him was under no scenario.
59:27 Will I ever manage people? Yeah. Yep. Just not going to do it. So anyway, so anyway, caught a new, uh, uh, calling could publish my podcast. And he also couldn't tell me, you know, if I
59:41 want to say, fuck, I'm going to say, fuck, I'm going to do whatever. Uh, but anyway, I started coming into the office probably about six months later, just cause coming into the office
59:52 probably better than sitting around day drinking, you know, probably wouldn't be the best thing for me. And so I've spent a long time, you know, I spent the last kind of three, three and a half
1:00:02 years hanging out here and stuff and they were like, what do you do? the couch, right? I think we figure my title is actually Galactic Viceroy. I love that. You know where that comes from?
1:00:14 LinkedIn makes you put a title. Totally. Yeah. So I was like unemployed dude would suck. So I put Galactic Viceroy and I kept getting texts from people. Congratulations on the new job. I'm like,
1:00:24 whatever. Pretty big role to my disability. But yeah, no, I always tell Colin, you know, fundraising is about getting the next date. It's not going to convince anybody at any given meeting.
1:00:39 You're not going to change their mind. Let's get them to spend more time with you because at some point, if they keep spending time with you, they wind up liking you. And that's when it's like,
1:00:48 yeah, okay, we'll give you a check. Yeah, no, and that's it. And, you know, at least for, you know, as the dollars of capital is going up and up and up, you know, they have partners to
1:00:59 people they need to look at in front of and some sense and justify why are they going to part with their money for some illogical.
1:01:10 with an unknown thing, maybe could come out of a computer at the ground. Some kid that'd shave, yeah, exactly. Whatever the story is. Exactly, and, you know, I've gotten to know this person
1:01:17 over six months a year. When I first met them, it looked like the progress looked like this, and, you know, now it's, here's where they are and wait another six months, it just, it helps
1:01:27 justify in a competitive process by to get in, and so, I don't know So, do this on the close, who do you wanna talk to? If listeners are out there and they've made it this long and I haven't
1:01:42 bored 'em to death, you've been fascinating, so they're still around, I've bored 'em to death, but - No, no. So, who do you wanna talk to in terms of, is there a company size, company range,
1:01:52 is there generally an officer at the company you wanna talk to, and then how do folks get in touch with you? Oh, yeah, for sure Look, um, uh, often, you know, We're most excited and we can be
1:02:06 most helpful to two sets of people, maybe a chief financial officer, controller, or just a business owner. You know, someone who is trying to rein in costs,
1:02:18 automate expense reports, you know, get rid of two tools. People, people don't love, make it easier.
1:02:24 We love to spend time, you know, we help our average company again, cut, cut expensive by about 5 and you'll kind of look at card expenses and time, which is pretty material for a lot of small
1:02:34 companies. What does that 5 mean? If I'm spending a million dollars, you're saying I'm going to spend950 a month? Yeah, exactly, especially on a card, that's typical. And sometimes it can be
1:02:50 quite a bit more. You know, and I think really,
1:02:57 you know, ramps sometimes is adopted and brought in by all, you know, different types of employees, Usually, it's someone who is interested in generating a little bit more profit at the end of
1:03:08 the year.
1:03:10 In terms of size, it totally varies. Probably the largest deployments have 100, 000 employees using it, but typically it can be a company with 200
1:03:26 to 800 people and just an easier tool to manage expenses And so, if it's of interest, we'd love to help, or just at
1:03:40 wwwrampcom, and I'm just Eric at rampcom and I'd be happy to help. Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on. Thanks a ton. I'm also looking forward to dinner. Yeah, I can't wait. I heard we're getting
1:03:52 staked. Okay, welcome to Texas where we need steak.