What does Ramp consider when selecting a card issuing partner?

Karim: I can give you the Ramp way of doing things. At Ramp, we like to make bets with asymmetric risk reward profiles. I'm sure you've heard that saying before, but no one's ever been fired for using JIRA or for picking JIRA. So, as a result, when you're a big company, and you need to pick issue tracking software, the default choice becomes JIRA.

In reality, I think there are some fantastic issue trackers out there, that give you a huge, competitive advantage, including Clubhouse, which we're a big fan of, which actually they rebranded to Shortcut. Or even an issue tracker like Linear.

They're the new kids on the block, but we're huge fans of them. Because they're running a lot faster than JIRA. They're much better. They satisfy the use cases of a fast growing software company a lot better. Versus JIRA, which is like, "Oh, we sort of satisfy everybody. And we have many, many use cases, but we don't excel in any one of them." 

And that's how we think about picking software and picking vendors at Ramp in general. There's a risk that it doesn't work out, but we'll find out quickly. But if it does work out, and we have a great relationship together, we're going to have a huge, competitive advantage over the many years to come. And that's how we make vendor decisions.

I think the speed at which a lot of these smaller modern platforms are evolving is impressive. And I think many of them will be able to succeed.

The advice that I would give is it can be short-sighted to just look at that snapshot of what's there today. And if you find an ambitious team that is moving very fast, where the product roadmap is aligned with yours, I would take a bet on them.