Recession-Proof - a podcast by Ramp

In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex Song and Kimia Hamidi discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan, Geoffrey Woo, Dan Chen, Anup Singh, Keith Masuda, Liz Christo, Kelly Battles, and Ken Suchoski.

Show Notes

In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex and Kimia discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan of OneScreen.ai, Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund Investment Fund, Dan Chen of Deltec, Anup Singh of Illumio, Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury, Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital, Kelly Battles of DataStax, and Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research.

Each of them share advice on how to overcome the challenges of the current state of the market, prioritize investments, and grow your business through the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

Here are a few highlights, check out the full episode for the rest… 



Why Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai emphasizes the importance of connecting the finance and marketing functions

“I will say there is an adversarial relationship between finance and basically every other part of the company. But to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or to not actually proactively reach out to them, to me, that therefore has always been like, you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sails being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead, or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Why are we ignoring it? And we're not creating clear lines of communication in alignment with a partner whose objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own.”


Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund explains why attention is more valuable than capital

“We all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people. That is the max limit of attention that exists in this world. You can print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally, the max attention cap of humanity is some 8 billion times 24 hours a day. Anything that can wield attention, I think, is going to be increasingly powerful over time.”


How Kelly Battles, a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, and Genesys thinks you can become a more well-rounded finance professional by…

“Get on a board if you can, even as a full-time executive, because it makes you a better executive. When you're a full-time exec, especially in an intense startup or private company scaling company, you can get tunnel vision. And I think having another company and seeing from a bird's eye view what they're going through gives you perspective, context, and learnings, and you start building your pattern recognition.”


Learn more about our season two guests:


Check out the full transcript here.


For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player. Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

What is Recession-Proof - a podcast by Ramp?

Welcome to Recession-Proof - a podcast by Ramp. Join us for in-depth, thought-provoking conversations with finance leaders, executives, and investors on the current state of the market and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond. Hosted by Alex Song, VP of Finance & Capital Markets and Kimia Hamidi, Head of Savings at Ramp.

Season 2 Round-Up Automated Transcript
[00:00:00] Kimia: This is the counter question to the, the final question that we always ask. What are you optimistic about? What did you get a sense of what he was worried about?
[00:00:11] Alex: I think everyone was just worried about uncertainty. Yeah. And, and the sort of the what is to come in macro. Right. I think he was generally, I would say, pretty circumspect about what the.
[00:00:25] Going to do and without the macro is going to react as I think. I think everyone should be Generally welcome to recession proof, a podcast by Remp. Join us for in depth thought provoking conversations with finance leaders. Executives and investors on the current state of the market and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond.
[00:00:51] I'm your host Alex Song.
[00:00:58] Kimia: In the final episode of Season two of the RAMP Podcast, Alex and I are gonna be discussing the best parts from the previous episodes.
[00:01:04] Alex: I will say this, like there's always been somewhat of a, I mean, let's be honest, an adversarial relationship between finance. Basically every other part of the company, you're telling me , you know, for those who are familiar with HubSpot, everybody might not be.
[00:01:21] We had marketing positioning, like make marketing people love, make love not spam. Right? Like attracts, don't interrupt. We had very positive, affirming brand positioning, but that was a company built by a bunch of MIT Sloan nerds. They were just really, really efficient at managing cash and capital. I remember being, In a meeting and one of the units I was in charge of, I think was nonprofits had an LTB deac of seven, and the CFO's like, Bring that down to three and grow faster.
[00:01:49] And I'm like, Cool. Awesome. I know what to do with that information. And to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or. To not actually proactively reach out to them. To me, the metaphor has always been like you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sales being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead.
[00:02:09] Or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Like why are we ignoring or not? Creating clear lines of communication and alignment with a partner who's objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own. I would say overall, the interview with Sam was pretty interesting because everyone's going through this live exercise, right?
[00:02:27] Of rebudgeting and re forecasting, and particularly they're thinking through marketing budgets, and so I think the emphasis on making sure that you have a nice amount of connectivity between the finance function as well as the marketing function. I think that probably resonates with folks. We are literally going through the LTV to.
[00:02:50] Calculation internally, we are literally going through the exercise of measuring and potentially compressing cap paybacks across some of our acquisition channels. So that's definitely something that's top of mind for us. business is not that complicated, right? Like you don't need calculus to look at a PN L and do it arithmetic.
[00:03:11] You gotta sell something that you charge more than a cost to make in some overhead at the very, very first level. Like, is your business actually unit economic good? If not, you better have a damn like super big brain like strategy, how it's gonna. Get good and don't just say you're gonna figure it out.
[00:03:29] There's really just two resources that all companies, all teams need. You need to have capital, right? Like you need. Be able to pay the bills, uh, keep the lights on. And the second and arguably more scarce community is attention, right? Like at a certain point, we all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people.
[00:03:47] That is like the max limit of attention that exists in this world, right? Like you can kind of print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally like the max attention cap of humanity. Some 8 billion times, 24 hours a day. So anything that can wield attention I think is gonna be increasingly powerful over time.
[00:04:11] I
[00:04:11] Kimia: thought the discussion was, Jeff was pretty interesting. I mean, one of the things that he does super well is, especially for early stage, where where anti fund really focuses is just boil it down to its absolute basic first principles in terms of executing. You don't need to overthink outside of building something that customers just desperately desire.
[00:04:35] Get to that point, ignore the rest, ignore the macroeconomic environment, and then just really focus on, on building a great business and the rest will follow, which is simple, not simplistic. Cause one of the things that we were chatting about is, is their competitive advantage in the competition for funding, uh, funding other companies and.
[00:04:56] One of the things that they're really looking to differentiate themselves on is, is the ability to bring attention. And that's a question that companies are, are asking themselves is, is how do we bring, how do we grab attention for ourselves, Especially. As startups are, are still being funded, even though
[00:05:11] Alex: this attention clip is very interesting because how do you create a mode around it?
[00:05:16] That's the thing. I think if you are in social media or you're in consumer TMT or whatnot, I think. That's a very, It makes a lot of sense, but like orchestrating a moat around that is very difficult. Right? I mean, just look at how people spend their time today versus five years ago versus 10 years ago.
[00:05:38] The shares are completely different, right? Like TikTok didn't exist five years ago, and then, you know, YouTube didn't. Whatever, 10 years ago, right? And then 20 years ago it was all print media and whatnot. So I feel like this, the tension thing is valuable, but how do you create a moat around it? And maybe that is, maybe that's the secret
[00:05:58] Kimia: sauce.
[00:05:59] One of, one of the other things that Jeff said that I, if I was interesting, was the compression around these cycles has dramatically, uh, increased. So where you could extract a ton of value from Google. You now get seven years and then Facebook, you get five years in TikTok, you get two years and maybe Cora, you get a year.
[00:06:18] And then there's all these, there's a new platform that you might get six months of value out of. And then you gotta keep your, your ear to the ground. And so I agree. I think it's interesting to create a mode. I, I wonder if the second point is what do you do once that has passed and how do you continue the moat?
[00:06:33] Is that now then product? Do you keep investing in, in that attention, or do you have enough where you can just spin the flywheel in
[00:06:40] Alex: the back? Wouldn't it be better just to invest in a company like Trans? Yes. Where you're just like, there is literally no attention paid to. Yes. And as a result of that, the buyers and the suppliers, you know, everyone is just priced in elastic because profits in the industry are literally regulated and they're well defined.
[00:07:01] And your remote could be decades long because no one's really competing against you there. There's
[00:07:08] Kimia: another interesting company called Parts Town. I don't know if you know about them. Distribution of Of small, small food repair, like food machine repair shop. Super, super sticky, super moy, do you care if you're paying 2 cents more for your fryer part?
[00:07:26] Good
[00:07:26] Alex: times. Build bad habits and bad times. Build good character. And I think when things are really great, it's really hard to think about the practices, the processes, the things that aren't maybe geared the way they should. Because they get papered over by the fact that everything seems fine. Uh, when things go bad, you sometimes go the opposite way.
[00:07:47] Things are okay, get thrown out because you're just so concerned about survival. So this quote by Dan Chan is very interesting cuz it reminds me of this, the quote that always goes, you know, good times create weak men and weak men create, you know, like that. I think this makes a lot of sense and, and it particularly resonates now, right?
[00:08:06] Because the good times, quote unquote, 20 20, 20 21. Infinite liquidity, sloshing around infinitely low rates and, and a lot of funding. I think that's created perhaps a sense of complacency amongst some teams, particularly, you know, management teams and finance teams in terms of physical discipline, and I think you followed this is where you saw a few companies who maybe grew a little bit too quickly.
[00:08:38] Perhaps ahead of where the business fundamentals would've necessarily warranted. And we have seen over the last couple of months some pretty spectacular blowups like fast. This is one example potentially, but I think this is definitely a sign of, this is an evergreen quote that is, you know, now more so than ever reflective of a sign of the times.
[00:09:01] Kimia: Alex, I think the question for you is go pick one of those companies that raised in peak. How would you rebuild that business?
[00:09:08] Alex: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a good question. I mean, ooh, I think some of these companies are, have to go through a lot of pain, right? If you overbuilt and you over hired, and if you don't necessarily have the right, you know, but in seats, then you are going to have to go through a painful process of reorganization.
[00:09:29] And Reprioritization. I think that a lot of projects, well, I think a great example of this would be companies that had or made a business of making moonshot beds, which makes a lot of sense in a zero interest rate environment, because literally a future value equals present value. But a lot of those moon vets at the, a lot of these moon shots are gonna, are going to have to be shut down or shut.
[00:09:56] Right. And I think that is actually what we're seeing at companies like mea, or maybe not MEA specifically, but maybe you know, Alphabet and a few of these other guys. There's
[00:10:08] Kimia: a great Bill girly quote that I love. There is always product market fit for selling a dollar for 90 cents regardless of the business.
[00:10:15] And that feels very apt to a lot of the companies over. Call it eight years. And so do you have product market fit? If you're selling a a dollar for a dollar 10, maybe. Probably. But bridging that delta is, is gonna be.
[00:10:29] Alex: We have real companies and businesses, you know, that are generating, you know, real sales and, and margins and profits in several cases.
[00:10:39] And so, you know, the advice or I guess commentary I would give around the current environment is we've seen the recommendations from some of the top, the VC firms, right? To cut back and, and be very careful in terms of how much you. And make sure you get to cash flow, you know, to break even and generate, you know, EBITDA and all that sort of stuff.
[00:11:02] I would say absolutely the viability and survival of your company is most essential. So having cash on the balance sheet, having liquidity, having, you know, three to four years of, of cash is, is sort of the benchmark I look at. You make sure you have the, the runway. To get through this period of time and to emerge, I think at NO'S interview overall was just very interesting to me because he's so experienced, He's run so many companies.
[00:11:30] A lot of these companies are profitable, and what's interesting is that sometimes we just forget about that. Right. Most companies, most of the time are meant to be profitable, right? You're supposed to be a profitable company, and I think profitability at the end of the day is the thing that gives you the most about flexibility with respect to operating, making bets.
[00:11:53] Large and small and having some amount of slack or flexibility around hiring, and it's just very interesting though that obviously within early stage or growth or venture or not, we tend not to be that familiar with companies that are intrinsically just very, very profitable. As a software company, sometimes you have less pressure on margins and you can discount, but with hardware you have to make sure that you have good gross margins, right?
[00:12:20] You have, uh, shipping logistics that you have to worry about and, you know, you may have like probably getting a little bit of the weeds here, but you might have to have like a cross stock and like all kinds of different things. You have distributors that you have to hold inventory and sell onto. End users, you have import export controls that are, you know, you still have import export on software companies, but it's not nearly to the same degree as hardware and especially in the security space, right?
[00:12:44] Where the government definitely doesn't want you selling some of these things to, to certain embargoed countries. The complexity is, is much higher with a hardware type of product. And I think, you know, Even with consumer hardware or consumer, I think the one thing that I learned from Keith interview is just all the processes around that, his experience and his background.
[00:13:05] Not only, you know, managing more software enabled companies, but also, uh, Palo Alto Network in the early days, which was a hardware company. And just his, his commentary about how actually managing finance and accounting at a hardware focused company was so much harder that I feel like I didn't appreci.
[00:13:25] Previously,
[00:13:26] Kimia: did he mention anything about pulling those lessons into software? Is it easier after going from there to a physical company? A physical manufacturing company, or just physical goods, I guess,
[00:13:37] Alex: to software? I think it was just the practice of being rigorous. I think it was just the practice of managing a p and l that was so much, I would say, maybe more sophisticated and complex than ones that potentially, you know, a B2B SaaS company might have to deal with.
[00:13:55] Like, I guess it is pretty interesting, right? Like imagine if you're selling switches and routers and every six months or every year you come out with a new version, right? What do you even do with your prior inventory? Probably, you know, recorded that as an asset on the balance sheet, or probably every couple months you have to go through the process of clearing that out.
[00:14:12] Selling it as a discount. Right. And monetizing inventory. That's probably not where you initially marked it, or maybe it is. Maybe you can mark it higher. You know, I don't know. I can see how they, the accounting treatments around stuff like that could get very interesting.
[00:14:28] Kimia: I'd also be interested to see how they treat that on the op side.
[00:14:30] Like you're trying to sell a new product. If there is an appetite, how do you sell the back catalog? And just what, like what is the operations around new cycles of releases for the same product? Like that's gotta create a ton of burden.
[00:14:43] Alex: Yeah. And then I think maybe a final thing, if I had more time, I would've loved to have talked to Keith A.
[00:14:49] Little bit more about maybe the pivot. Right. The pivot of the company from hardware focus to introducing new products and then introducing specifically software and then moving into the multi-product world. I think when whenever companies move from one business line or one business unit to multiple, right?
[00:15:09] That is always the most interesting challenge. I think that probably resonates with the folks here at RAMP as. I was a like customer support associate that got promoted into a sales ops job. And you know what I knew about sales ops when I was like 22 . Sure. And like, yeah, we usually take smart people and throw 'em into jobs and like let 'em learn on the fly.
[00:15:31] But I think that's actually like super dangerous to an early stage startup because the. Person and then the people surrounding them often don't know what they don't know. And so I think there's like a ton of value in finding either advisors, consultants, or outsourcing some portion of this to bring best practices into the mix.
[00:15:49] Kimia: One of my key takeaways from Liz, Is really the focus on, like, there is a, usually a right person per right stage, especially in sales and sales ops. And then really focusing on increased efficiency across your team. One of the things that, that she was talking about is, is really making sure on the more basic side, uh, making sure that sales ops is tackling the tooling.
[00:16:13] Do you have 30 tools that your reps need to log? And what does that, what does that create in terms of time? Just wasted log into tools. How do you centralize that process? And really just looking at what's the funnel? What's their steps to execute? How do you increase efficiency across each step? And then do you have the right person in the right position to lead that?
[00:16:36] Alex: Lead that. Have you seen the recent, uh, like I think this has been making the rounds of the various blogs and various podcasts, but have you seen the recent academic research that suggests that, like, historically when sales people get promoted to sales managers, that that's not necessarily the most effective thing to do and most optimal thing to do because you know the, the qualities, right?
[00:17:00] The qualities are different. The best salespeople may not necessarily be the best managers you might. Promoting in a very suboptimal way.
[00:17:08] Kimia: One of the things that stands out to me, and I'm sure you've heard this plenty of times, there's a very classic, great salespeople don't make great sales sales managers.
[00:17:16] If you turn your great sales manager or a great salesperson into a manager, everything often goes really bad. And thinking about how that actually breaks down, how do you think about, what do you think teams get wrong about building their ops? And then she goes on to say, One of the things I struggle with is that I think there are unbelievable sales manager.
[00:17:35] Who are currently sales reps, and I think the chance to grow into that, I guess they need the chance to grow into that. I think it's situational, it's a weak answer, and I would encourage people to look at what are the motivations for someone to make that leap. That makes sense. Is, is do they do, are they sufficiently motivated to do so?
[00:17:50] And then how do you, how do you evaluate for
[00:17:52] Alex: that? I think, I mean, maybe my key takeaway from this is that the observation is true. The characteristics that that makes someone a good salesperson doesn't necessarily make that person a, a good. Manager. Well, this, this is true of cross functions. This is not just sales, but I don't know why we specifically hinged on just the sales function.
[00:18:14] I think that's a function of just the, the academic research, right? I think the literature focuses on sales, but it could be anything. It could be a very strong ic, it could be a very strong software. I mean, think,
[00:18:24] Kimia: think about an engineer. Yeah, I was literally about to say
[00:18:27] Alex: maybe the solution is just a very strong IC.
[00:18:32] The existence and the the acceptance that you could be an extremely strong IC forever. I remember back in the day, by the way, I remember back in the day when I was have Morgan Stanley, there were folks who were absolute money makers on the trading desk, and at times I think there were people who. Even refused a promotion because there came a time when compensation didn't necessarily correlate one for one with your title anymore.
[00:19:05] And if a promotion meant that you had to manage more people than you were comfortable with, some of those people would just say, Well, I actually do wanna just stay and just keep doing what I'm doing as a VP or as an executive director, or, or, or anything that's not a partner. Let me just go do. And make a ton of money, right?
[00:19:24] The existence of that IC track enables something like that. But obviously, you know, I think a lot of companies, and there are many industries that probably don't have that track available.
[00:19:37] Kimia: The, or the, I mean it's interesting cuz the, the individual person in finance, you have inherent leverage where you can essentially print money, right?
[00:19:45] Like these, these institutions are designed to do. So. Where I think this is also true is in. If you think about a, a great ux UI designer, you rarely want them leveling up because there's, there's so much leverage for great design within your product, and there's a very long, very strong IC track
[00:20:02] Alex: within design.
[00:20:03] Interesting. Maybe that's the solution, is just to make it so that it's more accepted across more functions and, and more in. and more
[00:20:11] Kimia: rewarding, like there, there's more glory at the top for an individual. Cause I, I think you, I think you top out,
[00:20:16] Alex: Yeah. Make it so that compensation is, is only loosely correlated, maybe not correlated at all with your title.
[00:20:24] Right. That might be the solution. And also making it so that the title itself is not necessarily correlated to the number of people you are. and have a value generation, a value accrual, just be, be looked at both on an IC basis as well as on a, you know, a management basis. And it's not necessarily one before the other.
[00:20:45] It's not linear. It could just be two different axes that folks aren't validated
[00:20:49] Kimia: upon. This is probably a hot take only fueled by Twitter and what's going on there, but there are a lot of managers who are not comped according to the output of their team. And if, if, you know, There should be like that is how ICS are comped.
[00:21:07] Maybe there's an opportunity to take a very hard look at manager output and and comp accordingly. But I will say this, so that would skew the incentive to, well, can be a manager, cuz then you get more leverage and I don't know how to design that comp, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
[00:21:21] Alex: What I've seen emerge is that during the greed cycles, companies are encouraged to spend because growth is the currency, right? And sometimes like to unhealthy levels like growth at all costs. And it's not just like the markets, it's the board, the investors, you know, you, I've seen it now. And so, and part of it is because if, if everybody else is doing it, you're gonna fall behind if you're not also going for market share and doing this right?
[00:21:46] And then you pivot to the fear cycles where it's all. Like hyper analysis about every spend decision, every hire, RS reduction in forces like retooling, retrenching, et cetera. And I just think it's unhealthy. And so I feel like the advice, and, and I was, I'm being sincere, I was giving this advice in the last year or two as I've joined boards.
[00:22:06] It's like beware because we were clearly in a long-term greed cycle, and I think the best companies are those that are disciplined during the greed cycles. I think what was interesting was, uh, some of her commentary toward the end. So Kelly made some very interesting comments toward the end of our discussion about how you can be more well rounded as a finance professional, but really it's true just as anyone as a manager or just as an individual contributor.
[00:22:39] I think some of her experiences that. Uh, at least my key takeaway was, uh, serving on boards and especially working with nonprofits and just having that, giving you more of a perspective around your day job, which was very cool. One of her recommendations was just join as many boards as possible and help as many companies as possible with whatever issue that they may be seeing, because it's likely that you just saw.
[00:23:07] Or you will be seeing that very soon. So I think one of her earlier experiences was actually working with, uh, Wikipedia, which she basically said was a very formative experience. I could only imagine. So I think that was pretty interesting. That's
[00:23:24] Kimia: super interesting that one of the, one of the vertebrae of the spine of the internet.
[00:23:30] I can imagine that she learned a ton
[00:23:32] Alex: there. It's also sort of interesting cause as a non-profit, I can't even begin to guess how do you even manage the p and l for something like that? You have to break even, right? You have to be bright people. Yeah, of course you do. As a finance professional or a CFO or or board member, you have to have some sort of fiduciary duty.
[00:23:51] Clearly because you have employees, you have vendors, so clearly you can't just be entirely fiscally irresponsible. But then you know, is your mission still to maximize p and l? Is it still to maximize ROI C and free cash yield? I think that's actually kind of interesting. Maybe we should record a podcast next season about how does it work to run finance or lead finance at one of these non-profit organized entities like a foundation or endowment.
[00:24:19] Or, or, yeah, just a, just a, or a charity or something like
[00:24:21] Kimia: that. The other thing that I want, I wanna pull out of this is like what, what she said on being well rounded. I think it's the Silicon Valley narrative, is to say, you know, index on your strengths, ignore your weaknesses. But there's a very clear miss in that line of thinking where you can pick up different skills experiencing different.
[00:24:44] And so being well routed actually might be the long term better play versus I am the best, the single best at this one. Vertical strength versus seeing many district problems. Yep. I think payments and FinTech, it's a good place to
[00:24:58] Alex: be. If
[00:24:59] Kimia: you're concerned about inflation, I think you hit the nail on the head, Alex, where.
[00:25:04] I mean, these companies usually generate revenue as a percentage of the transaction value, right? So as the trend, as the average transaction size increases due, the inflation, if you're charging a take rate, if you're charging 2% on whatever that transaction value is, you know you're gonna, your revenues are gonna go up as that transaction size goes up.
[00:25:25] Uh, I think there's a couple other key points to, to
[00:25:27] Alex: think about here when
[00:25:29] Kimia: it comes to which business. Might be in a better position to, uh, survive an inflationary environment. And it's companies that have pricing power
[00:25:39] Alex: because of some reason, whether
[00:25:41] Kimia: it's a strong
[00:25:41] Alex: franchise or you have a
[00:25:43] Kimia: dominant position in the industry.
[00:25:45] Uh, and so as their expenses increase, you know, they can raise price to make sure
[00:25:51] Alex: that their revenues increase and maintain their earnings power of
[00:25:54] Kimia: the business. That's extremely important. Everyone was locked in their house for basically
[00:25:59] Alex: a year or two years. You had this
[00:26:01] Kimia: excess, uh, savings cuz you couldn't go out and really spend it.
[00:26:05] I mean, you spent some of it online. So now you have an
[00:26:08] Alex: economy that's reopening. You have borders that are reopening and people wanna go out and travel and move around and, and experience things. So I think you're seeing that shift back
[00:26:17] Kimia: to, to services that's been in place for some time. Yeah, and it's more, I, I think what we're seeing is the spend in, uh, you know,
[00:26:26] Alex: the
[00:26:26] Kimia: discretionary services was certainly there, right?
[00:26:29] Whether it's lodging, you know, travel, enter. Restaurant sales. We're seeing strong demand there. So those are the categories, uh, that are seeing that demand, but they're also the categories
[00:26:40] Alex: that might pull back quickly if we go into, uh, some sort downturn. The interview with Ken was very interesting. Kim, I wish you would've been able to sit in on this one.
[00:26:50] So, so Canada is one of the top payments. Nice on, on the sell side and in the world of equity research, there were at least a couple things that I thought were very, very, very interesting. One is we spent a little bit of time discussing inflation and how. As a payments company, everyone makes money in every vendor, right?
[00:27:11] Every goods and service provider, everyone makes money in nominal, not real. And so if you think about how price elastic or an elastic your customers are in a payments company, your customers are almost the most price in Elastic because you kind, you kind of just have to pay. You know, you're literally paying, you know, as a percent of the goods and service.
[00:27:31] So we talked a little bit about just how some industries and some businesses are a little bit more inflation resilient. So that was pretty interesting. But the second one that he talked about that was interesting was the fact that the, the shift between goods and services, that was kind of cool just with the way he put it.
[00:27:49] Because when people were stuck at home, they were just buying stuff. We were all just buying stuff, and we were getting stuff shipped to us on Instacart and DoorDash and Uber and Amazon. But then now what we're seeing is this massive, massive shift to services. Now we're traveling again, lodging, fuel, like all of this stuff where we're much more in person.
[00:28:11] People are getting haircuts again, and you know, two years ago they weren't. So I thought that was for understand. I think that's what's probably driving both real demand and allotted inflation as well in some of these other
[00:28:22] Kimia: sector. This is the counter question to the, the final question that we always ask.
[00:28:26] What are you optimistic about? What did you get a sense of what he was worried about?
[00:28:30] Alex: I think everyone was just worried about uncertainty. Yeah. And, and the sort of the what is to come in macro. Right. I think he was generally, Yeah, I would say pretty circumspect about what the Fed is going to do and without the macro is going to react as I think, I think everyone should be generally, but the, I think some people, I think Ken took a little bit of comfort in the fact that the payments industry and the FinTech industry clearly has some secular.
[00:29:06] Tailwinds behind it. If you just look at the breakdown of B2B payments, I think he spent a little bit of time going through this. A lot of it is still done over pay per check. Well, you know, that's a pretty big fat tam that you can go after. If you are someone in the payment space building out new tools, I think that can counterbalance any sort of, you know, hard or, or soft or, or middle landing.
[00:29:30] Or whatever happens in 2023.
[00:29:33] Kimia: It's kind of hard to believe that like conceptually, I know that's true that paper checks are, are still there, but in, in the world of. FinTech B2B payments, the closed ecosystem. It, part of me is just like, how is this still possible? And the other part is like, oh, massive opportunity for, for us and you know, other people to go after more commentary based on, there's just so much opportunity over anything.
[00:29:57] Alex: Yeah. I look forward to taking a break from podcasting for the holiday seasons, but we'll be back for an even more exciting season three with many more hot takes. Recession proof is brought to you by ramp. To find out more about RAMP and how we can help you control spend, save time, and automate busy work, visit ramp.com and then make sure to search for recession proof in Apple Podcasts.
[00:30:24] Spotify. And Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at ramp, thanks for listening.