Sri Batchu on Ramp’s Growth, the Cap Table Strategy, and Failing Conclusively
Sri Batchu (head of growth at Ramp, formerly head of growth at Instacart, VP Ops at Opendoor) and Lenny Rachitsky on how Ramp hit $100M ARR in two years and grew 4× in the following year — including the cap table strategy that seeded their initial customer base, the North Star Translation Layer that unified Instacart’s 300-person growth organisation, and why conclusive failure beats fast failure.
Key ideas
- Cap table as growth strategy. Ramp’s founders loaded their early cap table with influential operators, founders, and advisors. Those investors became the first customers — and evangelists — driving the initial wedge into the startup and tech community. Today the majority of Ramp’s revenue is mid-market and enterprise, but the founder community remains a durable source of brand love.
- North Star Translation Layer. At Instacart, the company North Star was monthly active orders (MAO). Each team had its own local metric (checkout conversion, load time, etc.). A translation layer — built jointly by finance and data — converted every team’s metric into expected MAO impact. This enabled cross-team resource allocation (‘should we add engineering here or there?’) on a common unit and kept all 300+ people aligned on a single company outcome.
- Failing conclusively, not just fast. ‘You can only learn if you have designed the right test and you failed conclusively — otherwise, you end up doing it over and over for years because every time a new executive joins, they have the same idea.’ Conclusive failure retires a hypothesis permanently. Fast failure that is inconclusive does not. The distinction matters most for experiments that are slow and expensive.
- Activation at Ramp. Four specific behaviours in the first 30 days determine whether a Ramp customer will be active long-term. The activation team is goaled entirely on driving customers through those four events.
- Small teams, high density. ‘I strongly, strongly believe that small teams of successful people can drive a lot more impact than larger teams of mediocre people.’ Ramp under 500 people at the scale of a much larger organisation is a deliberate structural choice.