8VC was founded to address major market gaps, and we’ve found several surprisingly close to home. We cofounded Affinity after seeing firsthand how legacy CRM falls short of real relationship intelligence, and today their platform is used by 3300 + investment firms. We noticed a similar gap in portfolio management and performance tracking, where manual work and nonexistent data were the norm. Driven by our own frustrations, we co-founded, seeded, and led the series A for Standard Metrics, which has grown to over 100 top investment firms and 7000+ companies while revolutionizing the efficiency and quality of data collection, portfolio analytics, and reporting. Now, building on the data foundation they created, they have launched Global Benchmarking, adding deep utility and macro awareness to match their micro abilities.
Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.
While most discussion of aviation breakthroughs focuses on areas like VTOL, advanced fuels, electrification, or autonomy, weight is a universal concern. In commercial aircraft, lowering costs through methods including weight reduction has helped expand access to air travel from an estimated 383 million global air passengers in 1970 to almost 4.5 billion in 2019. In defense, weight reduction means greater range - increasingly critical with conflict looming in the Indo-Pacific. In recent decades, weight reduction has largely involved replacing metals with composites - most notably in Airbus’ A350 and Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with total reduction estimated at 20%.
Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:
Today, we’re pleased to share the transcript from that conversation. Karim and Nik share numerous insights on Ramp’s journey, which recently marked five years and over $1 billion in customer savings. They explain how Ramp has been guided by the same mission since their first prototype, how they’ve achieved and maintained product/market fit, how they’ve built and sustained a dynamic and collaborative talent culture, and where AI has (and hasn’t) factored into their product evolution.
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