Karim Atiyeh on the ACH system's CSV reality, three-year expense reimbursement delays, and Ramp's long-game government thesis

financial system. Uh, welcome to the stream, Kareem. First time itself. Good to see you. Good to have you. Welcome. Welcome. We're getting to see supplies. Yes, we do.

Uh so we uh yeah so obviously we're talking about uh getting the entire government on ramp and then getting every country in the western world on on ramp uh one at a time.

Uh have I was talking to the Anderal guys about some of the integrations that they have to do into like these antiquated systems just to do communications because they want their drones to play into the mono systems. Have you started even digging into like what the technical standards are that are running?

We we we've talked to folks about like the Swift system and and you know stable coins but then there's also like the overnight payments thing. Uh like where do you even start with that?

Is it a GPT query or do you start talking to people like how do you build your your knowledge as a technical mind in how the government runs?

Because I I was telling Jordy I want to talk about the the the running the government on rampant more just because like I don't think most people know how expense reports work in the government. Like I don't think it this is seeing like is it technically feasible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh I mean I was it was crazy even yesterday I was hearing a story of someone who spent three years with the government and filed an expense report on their first week and only got the check back after they left. So three year delay. It's kind of crazy.

That's I mean think about in in in the you're at a company and you file an expense report and the company says yeah we're going to pay you back for this. Then you don't get it for three years. You would be you would be Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interest. But also, it's just offensive, right?

It's not it's not nice to an employee who's, you know, uh, you know, to to basically take uh take their their funds for such an egregious amount of time. So, it's kind of crazy. It's basically companies and government in some cases using uh their employees as a bank.

Like that's kind of what a bank is supposed to do, like front the cash so they could do your business and eventually pay them back. Yeah. And like to your point on the the complexity of those systems, I mean one of the first thing I did when we started on ramp is try to understand how a works. Sure. Totally.

And it is like absolutely mind-blowing. the the really boils down to very basic CSV files, Excel files almost that um every single entity puts together, constructs and at the end of the day they get shared through some system and there's some computer sitting somewhere that's reconciling these files together.

That's why it takes so long to send money is like all these systems run in batch uh take a full day to get access to that to get access to information and be able to reconcile it. And you got about eight of those, right? You got one for um like bank-to-bank payments. You got some for Yeah.

I mean really the way people used to file expenses is they used to submit their uh credit card statement that doesn't connect at all to uh the receipts that they have in the their inbox and then you have to wait an extra day before you find out that you actually forgot to uh submit the receipt that you wanted to submit for the the restaurant that you were at.

But I mean I think if you connect these systems obviously you can move a lot faster. Um talking to people in the government I don't think they even know what they're supposed to do.

So, a lot of them just end up uh either not filing expenses or they get a card with no controls and they're lucky if they have it then they share with their friends and who knows what what the money is being spent on but yeah one step at a time. Do you know much about like the counterparty?

Obviously, Palunteer uh pioneered like the forward deployed engineer because Sham Sankar was telling us the first time they sold Palunteer for onrem installation, the team on the other side, a a a software developer, tech person, IT person who worked for the government uh installed Palunteer on a box with like 4 gigs of RAM and they needed 16 or something like that.

Uh and we've seen with Doge folks like Luke Ferriator are going in. You could see Luke Ferriator in another world like working at Ramp or working at Palanteer or working at any of the the the high growth high very strong engineering culture companies.

Um do you think that there's a need for America's best and brightest to kind of do a tour of duty as maybe just an insane IMO level software developer in the government? Even if that takes away from your pipeline, I'm sure 100% that would be great.

I mean this is uh a company that we all have a stake in the equivalent would be yeah that's a good point we're all American right get a equity stake in the government like I want the government to run well we all win if we we're operating more efficiently we're making better decisions and we all pay less in taxes so no it's it's funny efficient spending which you know ramp is focused on non non-payroll spend right and so payroll spend gets political really quickly Right.

We talked about this with Eric briefly where yeah, if you're on the government's payroll, you don't most people don't want to be off it, right? Like they have a job, they've maybe been doing it a long time, but non-payroll spend should be the least political thing ever, right?

It should be like we should spend as little as possible and the dollars that we do spend should every single one down to the penny should be spent um efficiently. Um what what what are your other kind of reactions? How much how much are you spending time here at the event versus, you know, meetings around town?

I mean, the the the event is taking another form this year. It seems it's a lot bigger than it used to be. And the level of excitement is is incredible.

I think it's uh the first time that I felt that uh government is really trying hard to modernize, build bridges with um companies in Silicon Valley, New York and and other places. So I think I think people are on the same page that yes, we we do need to spend less. We do need to introduce technology to to help us.

And look, with with a lot of the advancements in AI, some of the problems that seem too intractable now, you could just just throw your massive database into an LLM and you can wrangle it that way. So like we we got better tools now to to do the work. Uh a lot of people are excited about it.

So we'll see what we can I mean, frankly, there are a lot of founders that are here thinking about very specific regulation or deregulation. Uh, obviously like nuclear energy is the biggest one that is very concrete. Make speed up the time to get a new reactor design approved. Is there anything like that in finance?

What is it? Give us some of the history. What's the good and what's the bad? It I mean it it's everywhere like money transmitter licenses is the most basic one today. To move money around uh you need a license.

But you not only an American license, you need a license in every single state, which is kind of crazy cuz they're all looking at the same things and making sure that you're abiding by the rules and like the rules are quite similar, but it's kind of crazy.

I I remember having to sit down in a room with uh Char on our team who who helped us do a lot of that work and there was a stack of papers this thick and I just had to sign one at a time. No way. It's like I read the first like I know what this is about. I read the second one, they're very similar.

And at some point I'm just like Like I'm already I'm already all in. Yeah. You're trapped in a room. There's a cup of coffee. He's a go sign. Yeah. Um how how has it been when when you look at uh sort of incumbent financial services companies?

A lot of them have had I'm imagine a large presence in Washington for a long time. Yeah. You imagine RAMP ends up with with a you know a fairly big office here at some point. How do you how do you look at that? I I imagine you've been taking trips here.

I know you've been coming to Hill Valley, but uh is this a place that you you and the team expect to be a lot more? Would love to. I mean, it would be great to to uh put our best resources forward and and try to help, but I honestly think about it the same way I thought about uh a lot of the products that we build.

I think it'd be a win if people spent as little time as possible in them. Yeah. And more of the work is being automated. I think part of the the problem that you have uh in and around Washington right now is like the incentives are so misaligned that you have incentives to like drag projects on.

They cost massive amounts of money. Yeah. Uh any little change that you want to do is also like another massive bell. And like our our hope is to just build great technology and hopefully if we do that if we do that well, we don't need uh massive sort of like time and and people investments to get them to work.

Like technology is just doing the job. No, I was talking to Eric too that the thing that stands out to me is is ramp is playing in decades and there's a lot of founders here that are like if I don't get a program of record in the next two years, like I'm done. Yeah.

And I think RAMP's position is being able to think long term. There's very pressing problems that we have right now.

you know, spending being being one of the biggest, but how do you kind of zoom out and be like, you know, you know, in in the fullness of time, I imagine ramp and and the government will have a you know, very meaningful partnership and and it's about finding the kind of right ways to do it in the beginning without understanding that you have tens of thousands of of happy customers and you got to make sure that they're like, you know, continuing to get uh resources and attention.

So, well, that's fantastic. We'll let you get back to the Thank you so much for coming on. Come on again soon. Uh we'll have Ara on uh probably next week at this point. But uh great the rotation. And let's bring in Josh.