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Ramp is frequently cited as the fastest-growing SaaS business in history, hitting a $100 million annualized revenue run rate in just two years. Achieving this level of velocity—especially in a competitive fintech landscape—requires more than just product-market fit; it demands a rigorously engineered growth engine. Sri Batchu, the Head of Growth at Ramp (and formerly of Instacart and Opendoor), offers a masterclass in how to operationalize speed, structure data-driven teams, and sequence B2B growth channels.
While many companies claim to move fast, Ramp has institutionalized velocity into their daily rituals and cultural DNA. By treating their cap table as a distribution channel and applying engineering resources directly to sales efficiency, they have rewritten the playbook for scaling enterprise software.
Key Takeaways
- Cap table as a growth strategy: Early growth was fueled by bringing founders and operators onto the cap table, turning investors into early adopters and advocates.
- Operationalizing velocity: The company tracks its age in days (e.g., Day 1529.4) rather than years to instill a sense of urgency and reduce decision-making cycle times.
- The metric translation layer: Successful growth teams translate high-level North Star metrics (like revenue) into specific input metrics that individual engineers can control daily.
- Fail conclusively, not just fast: In B2B environments with lower sample sizes, you must maximize the "treatment effect" of experiments to know for sure if a strategy works or fails.
- Prioritize Payback Period over LTV/CAC: In early-stage high-growth companies, Lifetime Value (LTV) relies on too many assumptions; Payback Period is a cleaner measure of efficiency.
The "Cap Table" Growth Strategy
In the earliest days, Ramp’s growth wasn't driven by traditional paid marketing or cold outbound sales alone. Instead, the founding team utilized a unique leverage point: their investors. By strategically inviting a large number of early-stage founders, operators, and advisors onto the cap table, they created a built-in customer base.
This approach turned equity holders into active users. While Ramp has since moved upmarket to serve mid-market and enterprise clients, that initial momentum was sparked by the tech founder community using the product they invested in. It validated the product immediately and created a high-trust referral network that traditional marketing channels could not replicate.
Institutionalizing Velocity
Velocity is often a buzzword, but at Ramp, it is a measurable metric. The company culture is razor-focused on reducing cycle time—the time it takes to make a decision and execute it. To keep this top of mind, the company maintains an internal counter visible to all employees.
"We have a site, days.ramp.com, where we can see how many days it has been since the founding of Ramp... It’s to remind people that we don't work in years or quarters, we work in days. Each day matters. Never put out something tomorrow that you can get done today."
This focus on time permeates the organization. The goal is to shrink the unit of time used for planning. By tracking time to the decimal point, the team reinforces a bias toward action. This culture attracts "A-players" who are frustrated by bureaucracy and motivated by seeing their work ship immediately.
Managing Burnout and Intensity
Working at this pace requires a specific approach to energy management. The focus is not necessarily on working more hours, but on ruthlessly prioritizing high-impact work. This involves "shipping your calendar"—auditing your schedule to ensure time allocation matches your highest priorities. When the work is mission-aligned and the team has autonomy, high intensity tends to lead to fulfillment rather than burnout.
Structuring the Growth Engine
Ramp’s growth team is not structured like a traditional marketing department. Instead of separating engineering and marketing, they embed technical talent directly into growth functions. The organization includes channel-based teams (Paid, Lifecycle, Field Marketing) supported by dedicated engineering resources.
Growth Engineering for Sales
One of Ramp’s most efficient channels is its sales team. This efficiency is powered by a dedicated "Growth Engineering" pod. This team’s mandate is not to build the core product, but to build technology that makes the sales team faster. This includes:
- Ingesting third-party data to enrich leads.
- Using AI to draft responses and automate workflows.
- Prioritizing leads based on intent signals.
By treating sales operations as an engineering problem, Ramp creates a competitive moat in distribution efficiency that is difficult for competitors to copy without similar technical investment.
The Metric Translation Layer
A common failure mode in growth teams is setting a high-level North Star metric—such as Revenue or Monthly Active Users—that individual contributors feel they cannot influence. A designer working on a checkout button or an engineer optimizing load times cannot directly see how their code changes "Revenue" that day.
To solve this, Sri advocates for a "translation layer."
"We create a translation layer via the finance and data team for every team's metric into the North Star. If you got one extra weekly order because of your checkout flow, it would have 'point X' impact on the company's North Star."
This system allows teams to optimize for their specific input metrics (e.g., reducing load time by 200ms) while the organization understands exactly how that improvement mathematically rolls up to the company-wide goal. At Ramp, the growth team’s North Star has historically been "Dollars of SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) Pipeline." Every project, from a website copy change to a new email sequence, is scored against its ability to generate pipeline dollars.
Experimentation: Failing Conclusively
The mantra "fail fast" is popular in Silicon Valley, but it is often misunderstood. Failing fast is useless if you do not learn why you failed. In consumer tech (like Facebook or Instacart), you have massive traffic volumes that allow for subtle multivariate testing. In B2B, traffic is lower, and sales cycles are longer.
Because of this, B2B growth teams must design experiments to fail conclusively. This often means maximizing the "treatment effect."
The "Kitchen Sink" Approach
If you have a hypothesis that a specific vertical (e.g., healthcare companies) is a good target, do not test it with a single email. Instead, launch a coordinated assault: custom landing pages, targeted ads, personalized outbound, and specific content—all at once.
If you throw every resource at the hypothesis and it still fails, you can conclusively say the market isn't there. If you only test one small tactic and it fails, you are left wondering if the strategy was wrong or if the execution was just weak.
Sequencing B2B Growth Channels
Companies often attempt to launch every channel simultaneously. However, there is a logical progression for B2B growth that balances cost and scalability. Sri outlines a specific maturity curve:
- Founder-led Sales: The founding team must learn how to sell the product before hiring anyone else.
- Sales Team & Low-Cost Marketing: Hire the first reps and engage in low-cost efforts like community management, small events, and content.
- PR and Communications: Use funding announcements and milestones to generate earned media.
- Paid Marketing & Brand: Only after the previous steps are working should you layer on expensive paid acquisition.
- SEO: While valuable, SEO takes time to build domain authority. It should be started alongside paid efforts but requires patience before it yields results.
Conclusion
Ramp’s journey to $100M ARR wasn't an accident; it was a result of treating growth as a discipline that combines finance, engineering, and culture. By aligning the entire organization around a single currency of success—whether that's "Active Orders" or "Pipeline Dollars"—and empowering teams to move with aggressive velocity, Ramp has set a new standard for how modern SaaS companies scale. For founders and growth leaders, the lesson is clear: build the machine that builds the growth, and never let a day pass without shipping.
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