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How Ramp hired the teams behind a $44B company

Engineers hired for slope

Two of Atiyeh's earliest engineering hires were Stanford freshmen he'd worked with as interns. One had sold a company to Apple and was an exceptional iOS developer. The other, Calvin Lee, built software extraordinarily fast. Neither knew anything about fintech, and both became foundational to Ramp's engineering culture. Lee now leads forward deployed engineering.

Atiyeh calls this hiring for slope, meaning how fast someone is growing, over what they already know. "When you hire these people they scale with you, they scale with the company," he said at SaaStr. Engineering grew from 10 people to 170.

Glyman looks for the same thing from a different angle. "I'm less interested in what is the résumé," he told David Senra. "I'm far more interested in proof of work." Ramp scouts GitHub and what he calls "bizarre fringe communities," and several of its engineers built popular Minecraft servers as teenagers.

Spiky people on small product teams

Ramp hires for what it calls spikiness, meaning extreme talent in one area rather than a candidate who checks every box. Interviewers take the one strength someone claims and dig into it. Atiyeh's main test is simple: if this person started a company, would he join them?

Those people then get room to work. Ramp breaks big problems into small ones and gives each team full ownership of how to solve them, so each one runs like a small startup inside the company. Anything that touches money or risk has to work without breaking. Everything else ships fast, and the occasional bug is accepted as the price.

A sales team that started with generalists

When Megan Yen joined as one of Ramp's first 30 hires, the go-to-market team was five people in sales, one in partnerships and nobody in marketing. Her brief was "Figure out how to double revenue in 3 months. And so just do whatever you need to do."

The first five business hires were what Ramp called "generalist bizops" people. They moved between product definition, early sales comp plans and whatever else needed doing. Yen went on to help build a sales team of more than 100 people.

Today's sales leader, SVP of Sales Max Freeman, still hires off the usual track. He has put former Goldman Sachs and Citi bankers in charge of large pieces of revenue. He also likes sellers who grew revenue at companies with weak products, because they had to create demand the hard way. His final filter is whether he'd buy something from the candidate himself. If not, he doesn't hire them.

What other startups can take from it

Most early teams can't recruit like Ramp does today. The ideas behind it travel well, though. Judge people on what they've built, look hard at one real strength instead of a checklist, and hire people who'll grow faster than the role.

The tricky part is finding them. People like Ramp's early engineers rarely look obvious on paper, and the best ones are usually off the market quickly. Contrario's recruiters know where those people are, from top schools and companies to networks across Latin America and India, so startups can meet the right ones before someone else does.

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