Geoff Charles
636 posts
Geoff Charles
@geoffintech
NYC
Joined April 2011
- People switching from FAANG to high growth startups often expect a smooth landing. Like where’s my kombucha and why is everything broken? This is a high growth startup. Grab a shovel and help me dig. You need to find the diggers.
- Our tech headcount strategy in a nutshell 1. Hire any engineer that clears our (extremely high) bar 2. Maintain ratios with xfunctional team ~1:5 design, ~1:10 PM, ~1:10 DS, ~1:30 PMM, ~1:20 POPs 3. Cap growth rate (<50% YoY) to maintain culture, onboarding productivity, and
- “Everyone wants to be a body builder, but nobody wants to lift heavy ass weights” Don’t join a high growth startup if you’re aren’t ready to move mountains. If it was easy, it would have been done before.
- It’s easy to lose customer empathy at scale. At Ramp, whenever a user gives us a less than stellar NPS, we give them a link to talk directly to our PM team. Everyone is on that rotation - including me. We’ve booked hundreds of feedback calls. Keeps us humble and focused.
- Last week I spoke to the Columbia entrepreneurship group about building and scaling startups. My path to CPO was all but linear. I made tons of mistakes, got stuck, and experienced many failures. Here are 7 principles I wish I knew when I was in college that I learned along
- Many hot takes on this one: 1. Data won’t give you the answer in B2B 2. Sales is your best friend, PLG doesn’t scale. Sit next to your best rep. 3. Don’t spend much time debating priorities - eventually it all needs to get built so execute 4. Roadmaps beyond 6 months areAlways awesome to learn from product leaders who’ve gone from 0-1 and beyond Tonight’s @Work_Bench NY Enterprise Tech Meetup breaks down how Ramp and Figma have built world class products and expanded to become full fledged platforms Lucky to host the inimitable @geoffintech,
- In the early days of Ramp, we decided not to integrate with expense mgmt software. We lost a LOT of deals - customers wanted data to sync. We believed owning the end to end experience was 10x better. 4 years later Expensify is a $150M company. Stay true to your vision.
- my mind when people say congrats in the office and I don't know what they mean exactly.
- Nothing gets me more fired up than when a competitor raises at a 7BN valuation with a product we shipped 6 months ago. 🔥🔥🔥
- I had a new hire ask me where do new product ideas come from. I have no clue. Ideas are cheap and can come from anyone. Foster product thinking in every part of your company. PMs are not the “ideas team”. They’re the team that can discern a good idea from what is mostly
- Say “hello” to our new Meeting Cost Calculator - a free tool to cut down on meetings. At Ramp, we’re focused on helping teams save their most valuable assets: time and money. Turns out one of the biggest wastes of both unnecessary meetings. So here's a little 🎁
