Build In-House vs. Buy / Integrate

Their editorial arm uses AI to publish better work faster, and they even have a person whose entire job is to help every employee at the company become more efficient using the latest AI workflows.

One is, there are a lot of expensive services that rich people and big companies are paid for right now, so in-house counsel or call center or whatever. And what cheap intelligence does is it makes those kinds of things affordable for small companies and individuals. So it stimulates demand.

It's interesting how similar this is to product building, where there's this idea that a founder top down can tell the team what to build, and it's this very waterfall cycle.

So I've seen, hey, can you come in and actually help me pitch this, design a custom pitch to my boss as to why we should do this today? And we literally got paid to build a sales pitch.

Eric, our CEO, has publicly talked about this. I think we as a company are very thoughtful about what we build in-house versus what we buy externally. I think a lot of engineering teams are often excited about building things in-house where there's off the shelf products that could basically work externally. And Ramp has historically been good at not falling into that trap.

I think what we've done differently is we've really focused on making all of those investments very much driven by technology and data. And so one example that I'll give you is that our sales teams are actually incredibly efficient by any metric that we look at and we obviously benchmark them.

One of the key pieces that we recognized was, with this new paradigm with AI, AI was probably going to write well over 90% of the software, in which case the role of a developer and what they're doing in the IDE is maybe reviewing code. Maybe it's actually a little bit different than what it is in the past. And we'll see this very soon with Windsurf.

And this is the fundamental premise on why we built the product. We thought we were going to get limited a ton if we had very, very basic UI out there. And I'll give you even a simple example here. We have this auto-complete product that completes a handful of lines of code.

Yeah. I think we might've been in this weird temporary phase where, for a while, it was so hard to build product that you mostly just had to be really good at building product and it maybe didn't matter if you had an intimate understanding of a specific customer.

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Yeah, because they're afraid. There are mutual benefits is a better way of saying it, if you build a tool custom to yourself when you've bought a tool because the vendor at that point is committed to you and they want you to be successful, so you often can get accelerated outcomes if you build on top of a third party than if you just build it yourself.

This comes up all the time, by the way, I talk to businesses every year that have this problem of we have a growth team, we're growing pretty fast. We have a guy that we hired, usually an engineer who stood up all these tools for us.

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Awesome. Okay, so let's come back to that, because that's a really important topic and it's something that every marketplace trends towards or thinks about is just like we're going to control the supply, we're going to manage it, we're going to maybe own it in the future, but let's get back to that. So, you work with a ton of marketplaces, you've built a bunch of marketplaces.

Today, my guest is Bret Taylor. Bret is an absolute legendary builder and founder. He co-created Google Maps at Google. He co-founded the social network, FriendFeed invented the like button and the real-time newsfeed, which he sold to Facebook. He then became CTO at Facebook. He then started a productivity company called Quip, which he sold to Salesforce for $750 million.

There's also things like open source, but I think I'm a huge believer in the confluence of technology and capitalism to produce just incredible outcomes for customers.