2025-09-26 20:58:31
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 163rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Dan is once again traveling around our great country slinging creatine gummies, so Packy here to fill in and bring you the Dose.
Let’s start with a PSA: don’t use Meta’s new slop machine, Vibes. It’s the company’s attempt to build The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, something that in the book is so entertaining that people can’t stop watching it and die. Take it from the man himself: “Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”
But the good news is, there’s lots of good news this week to drown it out. We have a lot of Arc, some cryopreservation, American anodes, a potential cure for Huntington’s Disease, a dash of Michael Levin and Anil Seth, and a menu of new psychedelics. Plus, let’s all support Nate the Great in his fight against cancer. What a week for the optimists.
Let’s get to it.
AI is calling. Ring ring. Hello? It’s Bland, the literal voice behind Fortune 500s.
Heard of Bland yet? It’s the world’s most powerful AI phone-calling agent. Chances are, you’ve already spoken to it without even noticing.
Enterprises are using it to handle millions of calls, texts, and webchat interactions 24/7 – all while perfectly representing their brand. From a single dashboard you can:
Build agents with any voice and personality, for any possible use case. Just define guardrails to control its behavior and plug in any of your external tools. Done.
Deploy your brand’s AI across every department from sales to operations to support with a single click. It will dynamically respond to any caller’s language, self-improve, and scale infinitely.
Track performance of campaigns, extract data, and watch it score a higher CSAT than human reps* – all while slashing costs.
Pretty wild, huh? Here, give it a call yourself.
Or Not Boring readers can get exclusive access to an even more advanced version here.
(1) Efficient generation of epitope-targeted de novo antibodies with Germinal
Brian Hie, Xiaojing Gao, and Santiago Mille Fragoso from Stanford and Arc Institute
Germinal centers on solving a fundamental challenge in computational antibody design: how to create molecules that are both binding the intended targets and biologically realistic. Previous approaches using structure prediction alone produced rigid, unnatural interfaces, while sequence-based methods lacked the structural precision needed for specific binding.
Another week, another Arc Institute drop.
Researchers at Arc and Stanford teamed up to release Germinal, a model for AI-designed antibody molecules. As one of the paper’s co-authors, Santiago Mille, wrote, “The ability to design antibodies against any protein of interest has major implications for medicine, biotech, and basic science.”
Germinal uses two machine learning systems - AlphaFold Multimer and IgLM to generate de novo (from scratch) antibodies tailored to bind specific epitopes on proteins. These antibodies are entirely computationally designed.
The team achieved nanomolar binding affinities (a measure of how tightly the antibody binds to its target) that are strong enough to be biologically relevant (used in therapeutics or diagnostics) for several challenging protein targets, including:
Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2: the virus causing COVID-19
PD-L1: a protein involved in immune regulation, often targeted in cancer therapies
VEGFR2: a protein linked to blood vessel growth, relevant in cancer and other diseases
Typically, antibody discovery involves screening thousands of candidates through experiments. Germinal significantly reduces the need for extensive lab-based testing, which can both speed up discovery timelines from months or years to weeks, which can be incredibly important in combating infectious diseases, and expands the universe of researchers able to work on to smaller labs and companies.
This seems to be a consistent pattern in AI for bio: models can dramatically reduce the time and cost it would take to run experiments in the lab. In this case, Germinal or one of its offspring (they’re open sourcing it) might be used to develop new diagnostics and fight infectious diseases and cancer.
Can’t wait to see what Arc does next week.
(jk, ed note: yesterday, Patrick Hsu’s lab at Arc published a paper in Nature showing “that bridge recombinase technology is capable of large-scale genomic rearrangements in human cells.” With CRISPR, a miracle technology itself, scientists can edit fewer than 100 DNA bases at a time. With this technology, they can edit a million bases at a time. Hsu tweeted that “The reason gene editing hasn’t transformed human health is that current gene editing technologies like CRISPR are very limited.” His implication being that bridge recombinase technology will be the thing that lets gene editing transform human health.)
As incredible as Arc’s specific breakthroughs have been, what’s more notable is how many breakthroughs the young organization has made in such a short time. Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, who cofounded Arc, shared some thoughts on that here.
Can’t wait to see what Arc does later today.
(2) Laura Deming’s Until Labs Raises $58 million for Cryopreservation
reversibly cryopreserve human organs ->
help transplant patients + build sustainable business ->
accelerate R&D for whole body cryo
Just in case progress in biology doesn’t keep up its current torrid pace, we can wait.
Laura Deming realized at age 8 that we were all going to die of a disease called aging. Unlike most eight-year-olds, she started doing something about it almost immediately. At 12, she joined Cynthia Kenyon’s lab at UCSF, where Kenyon had successfully increased the lifespan of C. elegans worms by a factor of ten through genetic engineering. By 14, she was at MIT studying physics. At 17, she dropped out to become an early Thiel Fellow and start the Longevity Fund.
Now, after more than a decade of investing in longevity companies, Deming is building something herself: Until, which just raised a $58M Series A led by Founders Fund.
Until is building a “pause button for biology,” trying to make one of the most foundational sci-fi ideas in the book, cryopreservation, a reality. Practically every space-based sci fi story involves cryo because, even near light-speed, the journeys are so long. Freeze yourself now, wake up fresh on a new world in a millennium or two.
We’re not quite there yet, so Until is starting by tackling more pressing and commercial needs. First, it’s going after organ donation, where most organs remain viable for only hours after procurement: 4-12 for hearts, lungs, and livers, 24-36 for kidneys. Then, it’ll do medical hibernation, giving patients with terminal diseases the option to pause their biological clock until cures are developed.
Even these more modest milestones sound incredibly sci-fi, but Until has already demonstrated recovery of electrical activity in cryopreserved rat brain tissue, the first report of action potentials in cryopreserved and rewarmed acutely resected neural tissue. They’re using a combination of novel cryoprotective agents, custom electromagnetic rewarming systems, and surgical protocols to cool tissue to -196°C (where molecular motion essentially stops) and then bring it back.
The key insight is elegant. The rate of molecular motion and chemical reactions can be controlled with a single knob: temperature. We already do this with embryos for IVF. Until is working to scale the same idea from tiny embryos to whole organs and, eventually, entire organisms.
Here at the Weekly Dose, we love a good long-term Master Plan. Even if this one takes centuries to play out, now we can be there to celebrate when it does.
(3) Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time
From BBC
One of the cruellest and most devastating diseases – Huntington’s – has been successfully treated for the first time, say doctors.
The disease runs through families, relentlessly kills brain cells and resembles a combination of dementia, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.
An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.
What a week for biotech!
Huntington’s Disease is one of the worst we humans face. Currently, it’s a long, slow death sentence that impacts 30,000 Americans (with a further 200,000 at risk) and about 5 out of every 100,000 people of European descent. There hasn’t been an effective treatment for the disease. People get it in their 30s or 40s and face a decline over 10-30 years until death.
On Wednesday, though, scientists at a company called uniQure announced incredibly promising results from a study: its gene therapy, paired with brain surgery, slowed the progression by 75% after 36 months in patients who received it. It also slowed decline of functional abilities in patients by 60%. They are hopeful that doing the treatment earlier, before the disease sets in, may eliminate it entirely.
UniQure plans to submit its application to the FDA in 2026, and hope to launch the therapy later next year if successful.
What a miracle, man.
Operations will initially support 2-5 GWh of capacity with the capability to expand up to 250 GWh within five years and become the largest anode production facility in the world. By manufacturing domestically at unprecedented scale, Sila is replacing graphite, a critical mineral overwhelmingly sourced from China, with a higher-performing, American-made alternative at a time when U.S. manufacturers are acutely focused on cutting supply chain vulnerabilities.
In the Electric Slide, we argued that America is lagging in manufacturing the key components of the Electric Stack — batteries, magnets & motors, power electronics, and embedded compute — and that in order to compete in the future, we would need to innovate on new chemistries and materials, and make them here.
On Tuesday, Sila made a step in that direction, announcing that it opened the nation’s first automotive-scale silicon anode plant, producing Si/C instead of graphite anodes.
The company, which is backed by Sutter Hill, 8VC, Mercedes-Benz, In-Q-Tel, the DOE, Coatue, Tiger, Bessemer, BlackRock, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and… Jared Leto, will start at 2-5 GWh of capacity focused on “customer applications, including electric mobility, consumer electronics, drones, AR/VR, and satellites.” If successful, it has the ability to expand two orders of magnitude to 250 GWh.
250 MWh seems… aggressive, given that it would represent over 8% of global battery manufacturing capacity based on the IEA’s current estimate of 3 TWh, but given the rate that demand for batteries is growing, it will hopefully be the first of many such announcements.
Every new battery chemistry comes with some advantages and disadvantages in the early days. On the pros side, Si/C offers higher specific capacity and energy density, which means more range or smaller packs (~20% better), and may be able to charge up to 2x faster. But Si/C will initially be more difficult to engineer and manufacture, leading to lower yields and higher $/kWh cost.
The question for Sila will be if they can dial in the engineering and manufacturing enough as they scale to move from high-end uses (like Mercedes EVs) to become a mass alternative to Chinese-dominated chemistries. We are rooting for them.
(5) Your Brain Isn’t a Computer and That Changes Everything
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal ft. Anil Seth and Michael Levin
We’ve forgotten that the idea of the brain as a computer is a metaphor and not the thing itself. - Anil Seth
One of my least favorite ideas in the AI discourse is that our brains are merely computers, and therefore, AI will be able to do everything we can.
I railed against it in Modern Magnificenza, focusing on Ilya Sutskever’s University of Toronto Commencement Speech in which he argues:
Slowly but surely - or maybe not so slowly - AI will keep getting better, and the day will come when AI will do all the things that we can do. Not just some of them, but all of them. Anything which I can learn, anything which anyone of you can learn, the AI will do as well.
How do we know this by the way? How can I be so sure of that?
The reason is that all of us have a brain, and the brain is a biological computer. That’s why. We have a brain. The brain is a biological computer. So why can’t a digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things? This is the one sentence summary for why AI will do all of those things. Because we have a brain, and a brain is a biological computer.
If that is the one sentence summary for why AI will replace us, then the notion rests on shaky ground.
In this excellent episode of Theories of Everything, neuroscientist Anil Seth and biologist / bioelectricist Michael Levin agree that the metaphor of brain-as-computer misses the messy, emergent, and context-dependent nature of real minds.
Seth argues that consciousness can’t be separated from the living, biological substrate. The brain isn’t just information processing that can be ported to silicon.
Levin disagrees that consciousness is substrate-dependent, but for a different, and, if I may say so, more beautiful, reason than Sutskever and co. He suggests that with the right interfaces, computers may be able to tap into the same deep, platonic layers of reality that biology does.
Look, anything I’m going to write here is going to mangle what these two geniuses are trying to say, but if you want to expand your mind listening to a conversation on mind (and xenobots, compositional agents, emergence, and much more) throw this one on.
You can read Curt’s thoughts on this topic, and on many of the mind-altering conversations he hosts, on his substack:
(6) A Startup Used AI to Make a Psychedelic Without the Trip
Emily Mullin for WIRED
Mindstate’s idea is to use this “psychedelic tofu” as a base that will be combined with other drugs to achieve precise states of consciousness. For its first combination, DiNardo says, the company is aiming to make a drug that reduces anxiety, increases insight, and upregulates aesthetic perception.
Dan’s OOO. No rules. We’re doing a sixth.
We’ve covered the promise of psychedelics in both treating mental health conditions (and in general) many times here in the Dose and in Not Boring. The world might be a better place if everyone just took a chill pill.
… which sounds like exactly what a startup called Mindstate is developing. Mindstate is one of a number of companies working to create pyschedelics without hallucinations. More people, they believe, would be able to access the benefits of psychedelics if they weren’t scared off by the drugs’ most extreme effects, and the FDA might be more willing to approve drugs that can be tested in double-blind studies. Last year, they rejected MDMA-assisted therapy in part because… if you’re taking MDMA, it’s pretty clear whether you’re in the control group or not.
Mindstate’s first drug candidate, MSD-001, is “a proprietary oral formulation of 5-MeO-MiPT, also known by the street name moxy. In Phase I trial results shared with WIRED, the drug was safe and well tolerated at five different doses in 47 healthy participants.” According to Mindstate CEO Dillan DiNardo:
Our first new “emotion in a bottle”: tranquil insightful beauty. An MSD-001 combo designed to reliably enhance aesthetic perception, without hallucinations. This state occasionally flickers in compounds like DOI, 2C-B, or mescaline. When people experience this effect, they see a new beauty in the everyday world around them. If the effect volume is a little too high, people say things like, “The legs of that chair - how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness!” (actual quote)
The goal, he says, is to build many psychoactive effects on top of MSD-001. “If successful,” he tweeted, “psychiatry would gain for mental states what CRISPR gave genetics, what mRNA gave vaccines, and what CAR-T gave immunology: a programmable substrate.”
Dillan, please reply to this email if you’re looking for trial participants.
Note: pairs well with Dan Brown’s new book, The Secret of Secrets.
Bonus: Nate the Great
A couple of weeks ago, Matt, a Not Boring reader from Philly, sent me an email. He wanted to tell me about his son, Nate the Great, and to spread the word about his family’s fight against cancer.
Nate was born on May 2nd. On June 20th, they found out he had a brain tumor.
Thanks to the team at CHOP, Matt said Nate is now doing “remarkably well.” CHOP is awesome - my brother Dan had open heart surgery there when he was a baby.
Nate, Matt, and their family are raising money for CHOP to fight pediatric cancer as part of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Parkway Run & Walk. The run is this Sunday, September 28th, and while Team Nate the Great is already crushing it with nearly $65k in donations, good for 2nd among all teams, I was hoping we could all team up to push them even higher, maybe even into first place.
As a Philly native, parent to two little kids, and brother to a beneficiary of CHOP’s miracle working (whose dad’s birthday is June 20th), I donated, and I would love to help them blow out their goal and help CHOP and others end pediatric cancer for good.
F*ck cancer. Go Nate.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Bland for sponsoring. Go get your very own phone-calling agent.
We’ll be back in your inbox with a Deep Dive next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-09-19 21:06:32
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 162nd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Another week, another heavy dose. We got AR hardware and software launches, new Waymo safety numbers that make scaled FSD all but inevitable, record-breaking datacenter buildouts, AI models that can predict health outcomes, and a total of 5 bonus stories. We aim to please here.
Let’s get to it.
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Implement MCP Auth with WorkOS →
(1) The All-In Podcast (minus Jason) Goes to the White House
Just kidding.
(1) Introducing Meta Ray-Ban Display: A Breakthrough Category of AI Glasses
From Meta
Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay present. With a quick glance at the in-lens display, you can accomplish everyday tasks—like checking messages, previewing photos, and collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts — all without needing to pull out your phone. It’s technology that keeps you tuned in to the world around you, not distracted from it.
Google Glass walked so that Meta Ray-Ban Display could run. Earlier this week at Connect, Meta’s annual developer conference and product showcase, Zuckerberg revealed the company’s latest generation AR glasses. While the demo itself was spotted with live-demo mishaps, the product itself is genuinely impressive. It looks cool, delivers real world functionality, and is only $799! Zuck, Boz and the boys cooked here frfr.
The Wayfarer-framed glasses hide a full-color, high-res display and pair with the Meta Neural Band, a wrist strap that reads tiny muscle signals so you can swipe, click, or even “type” without touching a screen. The display (which has gotten really strong reviews) can show messages, give turn-by-turn walking directions, live caption convos or videos, and show camera previews. You can also stream your POV, take calls, and listen to music. These land somewhere in between Airpods/previous versions of the Meta AR glasses and the full-on immersive Apple Vision Pro (which is about 5x more expensive.)
The product hits select shelves on September 30th and my guess is that they’ll sell pretty quickly this holiday season. They represent a big step in technology, but look like normal glasses your mom might wear and are at a very accessible price for a gift. I’m already planning on getting them for my dad for Christmas and letting him play with them for a few weeks.
For more on the glasses, check out this analysis from Ben Thompson and the wall-to-wall coverage, including an interview with Zuck, from the fellas at TBPN.
(2) Generating Bigger and Better Worlds
World Labs
At some point, in Zuck’s vision, AR and VR will converge into one set of stylish glasses. And when that time comes, World Labs will be ready with persistent, navigable, and controllable 3D worlds, generated with just a prompt.
The legendary Fei-Fei Li’s company rolled out its latest world model and Marble, which lets people generate their own worlds. You can see a bunch of them on World Labs’ twitter feed.
After a pretty rocky start (few decades?) for VR and the ~metaverse~, it’s cool to see some pretty mindblowing tech starting to emerge all at once. At their event, Meta Reality Labs also rolled out Hyperscapes, which allows people to capture their environments and turn them into 3D models viewable in the Quest headset.
Will this stuff ever replace good ol’ fashioned IRL hangs? I sure hope not. But for the time we’re spending digitally anyway, whether online or watching stuff, it might as well be more beautiful, interactive, and fun.
From Waymo
The data to date indicates the Waymo Driver is already making roads safer in the places where we currently operate. Specifically, the data below demonstrates that the Waymo Driver is better than humans at avoiding crashes that result in injuries — both of any severity and specifically serious ones — as well as those that lead to airbag deployments.
Back in the real world, Waymo is making it a much safer place to be, even if everyone is walking and driving around exploring virtual worlds in their Meta Ray Bans.
This week, Waymo released additional safety data on its vehicles and the results are quite convincing. Waymos experienced ~90% fewer crashes, 80% fewer injury-causing crashes ~78% fewer airbag deployments. That’s pretty wild. From my perspective, humans cause a surprisingly low amount of crashes given the circumstances…we’re all semi-distracted, hurling 5,000lb hunks of metal at 70mph+ speeds down winding and under-maintained roads. But despite the miraculous ease which we all drive everyday, more than 100 people die every day in the US from car crashes. With FSD, we can avoid 9 out of those 10 crashes and reduce the severity of the crashes that do happen.
So with Waymo (and Tesla and some Chinese players) what we have is this technology that makes driving a step-change safer, more convenient, and ultimately will make it much cheaper. It’s a win, win, win. And that win, win, win is starting to become hard to ignore for major cities. SF, Austin, Vegas, Phoenix are already pretty bought in and just this week Waymo and Lyft announced it’ll bring its services to Nashville. Soon, there will not be a single bachelor or bachelorette party that happens outside of a self-driving/robotaxi city.
(4) xAI’s Colossus 2 – First Gigawatt Datacenter In The World
From SemiAnalysis
The Colossus 2 project was kicked off on March 7th, 2025, when xAI acquired a 1m sqft warehouse in Memphis, and two adjacent sites totaling 100 acres. By August 22nd, 2025, we count 119 air-cooled chillers on site, i.e. roughly 200MW of cooling capacity. That’s enough to power roughly 110k GB200 NVL72. And an Elon tweet shows some racks were already installed in July.
xAI built in six months what took 15 months for Oracle, Crusoe and OpenAI!
Big couple of weeks for the great technology hub that is Tennessee. First, Waymo is coming to Nashville. Now, according to SemiAnalysis, xAI is in the process of building the first ever Gigawatt datacenter within The Volunteer State.
xAI’s Colossus 2 is pacing to be world’s first gigawatt-scale AI datacenter, which is more than triple the size of its already record-setting Colossus 1. Colossus 1 was constructed on a famously quick timeline. And Colossus 2 construction is keeping up the breakneck pace. In just six months, xAI converted a Memphis warehouse into a 200 MW facility, outpacing its hyperscaler competitors like Oracle and OpenAI which achieved similar buildouts in a tortoise pace of 15 months.
To make it happen, xAI did have to pull off some classic Elon magic. The company circumvented Tennessee permitting restrictions by using a decommissioned power plant just across state lines in Mississippi to power the data center. A lot more Elon magic is needed to get Colossus 2 fully operational, as the buildout is expected to cost an additional tens of billions of dollars. But if there’s any man who can finance a 11-figure data center, it’s Elon Musk. Welcome back, Elon.
(5) Learning the natural history of human disease with generative transformers
Shmatko et al in Nature
Delphi-2M predicts the rates of more than 1,000 diseases, conditional on each individual’s past disease history, with accuracy comparable to that of existing single-disease models. Delphi-2M’s generative nature also enables sampling of synthetic future health trajectories, providing meaningful estimates of potential disease burden for up to 20 years, and enabling the training of AI models that have never seen actual data.
Remember that movie Big Fish? Ewan McGregor plays the young Edward Bloom, a dying man recounting a lifetime of fantastical tall tales. Well one of those tall tales always stuck with me. Bloom meets a witch who shows him the exact vision of his own death in her glass eye. Knowing when and how he’ll die means Bloom moves through life fearless.
Knowing how you’ll die may be freeing, but predicting the diseases you might endure is more than freeing; it could be lifesaving. Delphi-2M is getting close. The AI model predicts risk for 1,000+ diseases decades ahead using just routine health records.
Trained on 400,000 anonymized UK Biobank participants and tested on 1.9 million Danes, it matched or beat existing single-disease tools like QRisk for heart disease without ever seeing Danish data. The model can map entire health trajectories, revealing how past diagnoses shape future risks, and even generate synthetic patient data to train other AIs without privacy issues. It excels at conditions with steady progression (heart disease, diabetes, sepsis) and can flag population-level disease burdens years in advance, helping systems plan for aging societies.
According to the research team behind the model, it’s still 5-10 years out from clinical use but they are exploring potential commercialization now and adding new data sources like genomic data to make it more accurate.
Bonus: A Cheeky Pint with Ambrook CEO Mackenzie Burnett
John Collison and Mackenzie Burnett
Mackenzie Burnett joins John Collison to talk about American agriculture, labor and immigration challenges, building rural resilience, ERPs, the principle of money movement, and carrying 50lbs of pork on Amtrak.
Packy here. A couple months ago, I spoke with Mackenzie Burnett, the founder and CEO of our portfolio company, Ambrook, for a follow-up to her initial Founder’s Letter. You can watch our conversation here.
This past week, Mackenzie went on Cheeky Pint with Stripe co-founder John Collison to talk about what she and the team are building at Ambrook, and as importantly, why.
Mack has been on a hot streak of my favorite podcasts, first on Dialectic, now on Cheeky Pint. I love to see it. The dream that we write about every week here in the Dose isn’t the American Dream if not everyone who is willing to work hard and contribute can participate.
Ambrook is making it easier for small businesses to build great businesses, starting with farms, and the country will be a better place when they succeed. Getting on the Stripe megaphone should help accelerate the Dream.
DOUBLE TRIPLE QUADRUPLE QUINTUPLE BONUS
It was a big week out there. Sharing a few more for an extra little jolt of optimism:
Valar Atomics broke ground in Utah alongside its partner, Kiewit, at the San Rafael Research Center for its first reactor, Ward250. Big step in the race to criticality by America’s 250th birthday.
Arc Institute released its preprint, “Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models.” The scientists are out there building models that can design entire genomes.
Vast Space has fully welded and will soon begin testing on Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station. Click to watch the video of that beauty.
Claude - Keep Thinking. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a beautifully optimistic ad about the times we live in. There’s never been a better time to do…anything, really.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring. Go securely authorize MCP servers. All the cool kids are doing it.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-09-12 20:58:39
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 161st Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Packy here. This was a dark week in America.
On Monday and Tuesday, my whole twitter feed was filled with images and video of the murder of Iryna Zarutska. On Wednesday, I was offline for most of the day at Primary’s NYC Summit. When I opened up Twitter in the afternoon, the first tweet I saw was Mike Solana’s: “it can not be like this.” I scrolled for a few seconds before I realized what he was talking about; Charlie Kirk had been shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. He passed away soon after.
The ~36 hours between then and now have been weird, online. On the far left, some people are celebrating the murder, which left two young girls without a dad. On the far right, some people are calling for Civil War. These are the extremes, expressed by a loud minority, but they’ve been amplified to the point that it seems like “the left” is celebrating a murder and “the right” wants War.
Most people, however, don’t hold those extreme views. Most people are sad - about the specific incidents, and about the fact that we keep opening up our feeds to some new tragedy, to the point that it seems like the world is full of darkness and hatred.
Because we experience so much of this through the internet, things get distorted. People cheer, I think, because it feels like a video game. Not real life. But it’s not a video game. What happens online bubbles over into real life. People get radicalized, and they radicalize others, and they take peoples’ real lives.
All of this makes bad outcomes feel inevitable. They are not. As David Foster Wallace said about the internet’s influence nearly 30 years ago, “at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this.”
This is individual machinery. The vast, vast majority of us — those who think that killing innocent people is abhorrent and those who want no part of a Civil War, those who recognize the humanity in other people and who want to see each other be safe, healthy, and happy — need to resist the temptation to see the world the way a tiny handful of very loud voices (and bots) online want us to see it.
This is not to say that we’re not living through a dangerous time. We are. These things can bubble over. And it’s OK to be angry and sad when tragedies happen. Good even, in small doses. We’re human.
But we can’t become hopeless. Because the world is a much better place than it seems online, and it’s worth fighting to keep it that way. What will prevent it from bubbling over is us. Both optimism and pessimism are self-fulfilling prophecies.
So while it feels weird to focus on the good things that happened amidst all the bad this week, that’s what we do here at Not Boring, and that’s what we’ll do every week. Over to Dan for the Dose. Then, all of us, let’s log off for the weekend.
Let’s get to it.
AI is calling. Ring ring. Hello? It's Bland, the literal voice behind Fortune 500s.
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Deploy your brand’s AI across every department from sales to operations to support with a single click. It will dynamically respond to any caller’s language, self-improve, and scale infinitely.
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Pretty wild, huh? Here, give it a call yourself.
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(1) NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year
From NASA
A sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero Crater could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. Taken from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” last year, the sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” contains potential biosignatures.
Houston, we have potential biosignatures.
NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found the strongest hint yet of past life on Mars. While drilling into a mudstone called Cheyava Falls, the rover uncovered minerals like vivianite and greigite along with organic carbon and sulfur, all common byproducts of microbial activity on Earth. These “leopard spots” could form without life, but the rock shows no signs of the heat or acidity usually required for that. So we can’t exactly say “life” and we can’t exactly say “signs of life” but we can say “it’d be pretty hard to imagine there wasn’t life.”
The findings, published in Nature, suggest Mars might have remained habitable longer than scientists previously believed. The sample, named Sapphire Canyon, is one of 27 cores waiting to be brought back to Earth, but the Mars Sample Return mission is stalled by rising costs and budget cuts. If only there was a man whose mission was to make getting back and forth between Mars easier and more economical, so easy in fact, that we could colonize the planet…
(2) The Future of Starlink Direct to Cell
From SpaceX
SpaceX has entered into a purchase agreement with EchoStar for 50 MHz of exclusive S-band spectrum in the US as well as global Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) spectrum licenses. This agreement will enable us to develop and deploy our next generation Starlink Direct to Cell constellation which will be capable of providing broadband service to cell phones globally.
Oh yeah, totally forgot about Elon. He’s that guy. He’s him. The Trillion Dollar Man.
And while Elon’s SpaceX tries to make us multi-planetary, the company is funding it’s mission via it’s highly lucrative internet and network provider Starlink. And Starlink is making big moves. In a deal worth $17B, it just locked in exclusive S-band spectrum from EchoStar (great evil company in a movie name btw) to supercharge the next generation of Starlink Direct to Cell. The Direct to Cell project uses Starlink satellites to provide 4G and future 5G service directly to ordinary mobile phones anywhere on Earth. The current network already has more than 600 satellites beaming 4G to over six million users worldwide, letting ordinary LTE phones text, call, and run apps anywhere there’s sky. Built as “cell towers in space,” these satellites sit lower than rivals for a stronger link and tie into Starlink’s 8,000-satellite laser mesh for global reach.
The new spectrum from EchoStar and custom SpaceX silicon will push performance far beyond today’s system. Next-gen satellites will handle thousands of beams, 20 times the throughput, and up to 100 times the total capacity of the first generation, aiming for full 5G speeds on standard phones. SpaceX plans to launch these with Starship’s heavy lift, combining massive bandwidth with seamless integration for carriers like T-Mobile, Rogers, and KDDI.
It’s wild that at this point Elon basically upends entire 12-figure industries, and it’s not even major news. Just another day at the office.
(3) Alterego
From Alterego
Introducing Alterego, the first near-telepathic interface, designed to make technology as intuitive as using your inner voice.
In an age of increasingly impressive launch videos, this was one of the cooler demo videos I have seen. It comes from the startup Alterego, which is developing Silent Sense, a non-invasive device which understands what you intend to say without speaking, allowing you to extend your thinking without the need to type, tap, or talk out loud. I don’t think it’s technically telepathy, but if it walks, talks (or in this case, doesn’t talk) and smells like telepathy…
Alterego’s headset senses the faint electrical signals that fire in your jaw and throat when you silently form words, a process called subvocal speech. It’s like when you read silently and your mouth and throat make tiny movements even though you’re not speaking. Surface electrodes capture these neuromuscular signals and AI models decode the patterns into text or commands in real time. Replies come back through bone-conduction audio, so you hear responses privately without using speakers or earbuds.
Just thinking out loud here, and I know this is just a demo, but a device like Alterego’s could fundamentally change the ways we interact and communicate with everything and everyone around us.
(4) Magnetic field–enhanced vertical integration enables embodied intelligence in untethered soft robots
Li et al in Science
Embodied intelligence in soft robotics offers unprecedented capabilities for operating in uncertain, confined, and fragile environments that challenge conventional technologies. However, achieving true embodied intelligence—which requires continuous environmental sensing, real-time control, and autonomous decision-making—faces challenges in energy management and system integration. We developed deformation-resilient flexible batteries with enhanced performance under magnetic fields inherently present in magnetically actuated soft robots, with capacity retention after 200 cycles improved from 31.3 to 57.3%.
Soft robots have a hard challenge, and a simple telehealth consultation cannot bring them relief. These ultra-flexible machines, designed to slip through tight spaces, struggle to carry reliable onboard power because conventional batteries can’t survive constant bending and twisting without rapidly losing capacity or breaking.
Researchers cracked that by building a manta ray–style soft robot whose own magnetic field both propels it and keeps its flexible zinc-manganese batteries stable, nearly doubling their capacity retention. External magnetic fields push and pull the robot’s magnetized body, creating the forces and torques that make it swim, while the same fields protect its batteries so power keeps flowing as it moves. The result is a robot that can roam untethered for hours, sensing and reacting to its environment, whether underwater or in narrow passages, in real time. It’s a blueprint for soft robots that can explore hard-to-reach places, assist in medical procedures, or power next-generation wearables without being tied to a cord.
(5) We’ve just completed our first Jetson ONE delivery!
Jetson Aero
Palmer Luckey — tech visionary from California — completed ground training in under 50 minutes before confidently taking the controls for his first low-altitude flights. A record demonstrating Palmer’s unique understanding of advanced technologies and just how easy our personal single-seater eVTOL is to fly.
As avowed J. Storrs Hall fans and fellow askers of the question, “Where is my flying car?,” we get all tingly whenever we see developments in personal aviation. We’re also big Palmer Luckey guys; he does billionaire as well as anyone out there.
So we were very happy this week when Jetson Aero delivered its first eVTOL to the Oculus and Anduril founder, who apparently learned how to fly the thing in under an hour.
It’s a little terrifying to see one of the people America is depending on to build hard, crazy things getting up in the air in that little guy, and we’re not sure we’d get in a Jetson ONE quite yet, but it does seem like we’re finally getting much closer to an era of ubiquitous personal flight. Given that batteries, motors, power electronics, and embedded compute keep getting better and cheaper, it’s practically inevitable.
A Jetsons future in which we’re all zipping around in the skies is the future we were promised. Less traffic. Faster commutes. Flying cars and their equivalents will be a sign that we are back on track.
And because people have always tended to commute for the same amount of time, even as our modes of transportation have gotten faster, the second-order effects will be really interesting to watch play out. If it takes as long to get out to the country that it currently takes to get to the exurbs, I bet we’ll see a bunch of interesting development projects like Esmerelda, California Forever, and Proto-Town take off.
For the time being, though, please enjoy watching Palmer Luckey fly.
BONUS: A Big Week for AI Doing Cool Stuff for Humans
Math, Inc. launches Gauss and completes Prime Number Theorem Challenge
“The Math Inc. team is excited to introduce Gauss, a first-of-its-kind autoformalization agent for assisting human expert mathematicians at formal verification. Using Gauss, we have completed a challenge set by Fields Medallist Terence Tao and Alex Kontorovich in January 2024 to formalize the strong Prime Number Theorem (PNT) in Lean (GitHub)…
Our results represent the first steps towards formalization at an unprecedented scale. Gauss will soon dramatically compress the time to complete massive initiatives. With further algorithmic improvements, we aim to increase the sum total of formal code by 2-3 orders of magnitude in the coming 12 months. This will serve as the training ground for a new paradigm — verified superintelligence and the machine polymaths that will power it.”
Introducing Oboe, the easiest way to learn anything, with magical courses made just for you.
“We’re heading toward a future where humans only exist to feed AI. AI gets smarter, we get stupider. But what if AI’s purpose was to feed us? That’s the future we hope Oboe can help nudge us all towards.
Oboe is the world’s first AI-powered generalized learning platform. With a single prompt you can generate a personalized course about anything. From the history of AI to contract law, from ordering wine in France to understanding how mortgages work. And the more you use it, the better it gets at teaching you.”
Replit raises $250 million at $3 billion and launches Agent 3
Packy here. Not Boring Portfolio company and former Deep Dive subject, Replit, announced that it raised a $250 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, and more importantly, launched Agent 3 - which can run for 200 minutes to build, test, and run full websites. It can even create other agents.
It is really good! I am not an engineer, so I’ve been excited to try new AI coding tools to see if even I can use them to make websites. In The Electric Slide, I used Claude Code to make the Electric Slide website, which was very cool. But when I tried to use Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex to make me a website for not boring, they inevitably ran into bugs as soon as I asked them to change something from the first version they made. As a non-engineer, even with their help, even using Cursor, it took forever to figure out how to fix the issues, and I just gave up.
Yesterday, I gave Replit’s Agent 3 the same instructions, and it just… worked. We went back and forth on the design for a bit before it started coding, and it got the suggestions I made. Then it designed, coded, and tested for 55 minutes. All while I was writing the intro to the Dose. In a sidebar, it walks you through testing on each of the different pages of the website, so you can see exactly what it did. When it found bugs, it fixed them itself. I even had it design a scratchpad page that could handle things like Spotify embeds on movable cards, and that worked, too.
My prompting was not super specific, so the site is not nearly as good as it would be if I hired an agency to do it (particularly on the design and copy), but given an hour or two on this (which I might spend this weekend), I bet I could make something I’d be happy to publish. Given that I spent all of three minutes on this, that’s wild.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Bland for sponsoring. Go build your company a voice!
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-09-09 20:47:18
Welcome to the 1,324 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 249,839 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday!
One of my goals for this newsletter (and Not Boring Capital) is to find a handful of generational companies as early as possible, write their story in chapters over time, and then publish the whole thing as a book when they IPO.
Ramp is the model. I first wrote about the company in December 2020, when it was valued at $300 million and doing something in the single-digit millions in revenue. Even then, it was obvious that something special was happening, and I invested both personally, before I had a fund, and then through Not Boring Capital.
But early hype often fades. What’s been most remarkable in writing about Ramp three times since is that each time, the new reality outruns the old hype.
Ramp is the rare company that gets better and moves faster with time.
Today, Ramp is announcing that it’s crossed $1 billion in annualized gross revenue while doubling year-over-year and generating positive cash flow. In celebration, I’m taking another snapshot in time to look at where the company has been, where it is today, and what it might grow into in the fullness of time.
This is the latest chapter in a story I’ve been writing for years, and plan to keep writing for many years to come.
Let’s get to it.
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A little over four years ago, on April 8, 2021, I wrote about Ramp’s Double-Unicorn Rounds.
At the time, Ramp was just two years old. In the piece, we announced that Ramp had raised not one, but two rounds. D1 led a $65 million financing at a $1.1 billion valuation. Stripe came in with $50 million at $1.6 billion.
I knew that that would seem crazy on its face, a real-time symptom of COVID-era excess: a company that young raising at those valuations in that structure. So I wrote a section in the Deep Dive titled “Has Venture Capital Lost Its Mind?” which argued that no, it hadn’t, or at least, that Ramp’s back-to-back fundraises weren’t proof that it had.
The logic was: growth matters, and it matters more the longer it lasts.
Take two companies, Company A and Company B. Company A reaches $100 million in four years, growing 115%. Company B takes three years, growing at 216%. In year five, Company A will be at $215 million in revenue. Company B will be 5x higher: $1 billion.
Back then, of course, the $1 billion revenue number was hypothetical. I was just making a point that growth trajectory matters.
Today, it is not.
Today, Ramp is announcing that it has crossed $1 billion in annualized gross revenue.
That milestone, achieved in just six years since incorporation, five-and-a-half since product launch, and three-and-a-half since crossing $100 million in annualized gross revenue (annualized revenue), is extraordinary on its own.
That the company is roughly doubling revenue year-over-year crossing the milestone is even more noteworthy. According to an analysis that Founders Fund Partner Amin Mirzadegan shared with me, it puts Ramp among an elite group of companies - Snowflake, AppLovin, CrowdStrike, OpenAI, and Anthropic - that have grown at this pace while crossing both $500 million and $1 billion in revenue.1 The rest of the group sports valuations north of $75 billion.
In the four previous Deep Dives I’ve written on Ramp, a common theme and question has been: “Wow, Ramp is growing really fast! But can they keep it up??”
That is still a question, but each year that they keep it up, the answer becomes more apparent: yes, they can keep it up, even if it seems improbable based on the classical model of business physics.
Now, the much more interesting questions to ask about Ramp are how they continue to grow so fast, and maybe more importantly, what happens to the business as it grows.
We live in an age of hypergrowth. You can’t open up twitter without hearing about a new company that just became the fastest company ever to $100 million in ARR. Each announcement, though, adds to a growing sense of unease: that none of this is sustainable. Companies burn unsustainable amounts of cash growing products with poor unit economics.
Which makes this next announcement all the more notable:
Ramp is generating operating cash flow.
Which makes sense, because Ramp’s value proposition to its customers is that it will make them more efficient. Efficiency is the result of saving time and money. And if Ramp is all about making other companies more efficient, they better be efficient themselves!
Ramp has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue while doubling revenue in the past year and generating operating cash flow.
Among all the B2B companies who have crossed $1 billion in revenue at any speed while cash flow positive, Ramp has achieved this milestone years faster than anyone else.
I’ve written about a lot of the things that have contributed to putting Ramp in such great company. Counterpositioning against points-happy incumbents. Engineering-led everything. Trajectory and velocity. Owning the transaction layer. Mission, structure, and talent.
More than any company I’ve ever met, though, the Ramp story is really a story about time.
Ramp is a business focused on saving time that gets better with time.
Time is money. This is an old adage, a Ramp marketing tagline, and the truth.
No company is more obsessed with the relationship between time and money than Ramp.
The business started as a brainstorm about time to money. More specifically, as Ramp CEO Eric Glyman shared on My First Million, after he and Ramp CTO Karim Atiyeh sold their first startup, Paribus, to Capital One, and after they put in a year of making sure the acquisition paid off for the acquirer, they started to think about what to do next.
During that process, they set a goal: to build a company that could be worth $1 billion in 18 months.
Never mind that no New York City company had ever done that. Calvin Lee, Ramp’s founding engineer turned Swiss-Army-Knife-If-Swiss-Army-Knives-Included-the-Best-Version-of-Each-Tool, looked it up later and found that no New York City company had ever hit the $1 billion mark within three years, let alone 18 months.
Luckily, Calvin looked it up in 2021, after Ramp was valued at $1 billion at just two-years-old. Sometimes it’s better not to know something’s impossible.
At the time of the double-unicorn rounds in April 2021, Eric told Sam Parr, Ramp was doing something like $10 million in annualized revenue. If you viewed Ramp as a snapshot, at that point or almost any point in its history, its valuation seemed crazy. D1 gave it a 110x revenue multiple. Stripe, the next day, valued it at 160x annualized revenue.
A year later, in March 2022, the 2021 valuation didn’t seem crazy at all. Ramp had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue, which meant it was valued at 16x annualized revenue. Then, Keith Rabois at Founders Fund led a round at a new crazy valuation: $8.1 billion, or an 81x annualized revenue multiple.
The markets tanked soon thereafter, and while most companies tried to hold on to their ZIRP-era valuations for dear life, Ramp was one of the first to take its medicine, raising $300 million at a $5.5 billion valuation in August 2023. A company so relentlessly focused on time can’t hold on to the past; it needs to take stock of the present and once again look forward.
As 49ers Head Coach Bill Walsh wrote, and as Eric and Calvin referenced in our conversations, The Score Takes Care of Itself. Get the inputs right, and the outputs follow, in time.
To that end, market conditions be damned, or even perhaps because the value proposition – saving time and money - was more compelling when cash stopped flowing so freely, Ramp continued to grow. Between its $8.1 billion 2022 round and its $5.5 billion 2023 round, it grew annualized revenue three times, to $300 million.
The revenue multiple compressed: under 18.3x on a trailing basis; on a forward basis, Ramp was practically free. Because it kept growing and growing. By June 2024, its revenue approached half-a-billion American Dollars. Its valuation, in its May 2024 funding led by Khosla and Founders Fund, followed: $7.65 billion, good for an annualized revenue multiple of 15.9x.
Then Ramp, by Ramp standards, went quiet. Heads down, growing.
When it popped back up after ten months in the desert in March 2025 to announce a secondary sale at a $13 billion valuation, Ramp called itself “The Time and Money Company.” It ended that quarter above $700 million in annualized revenue. The tender valued the company at 18x revenue. It also meant that the investors who invested at $7.65 billion a year earlier were now sitting at ~10x annualized revenue.
Ramp has not stayed quiet since.
In June, Ramp announced a new round of funding at $16 billion, led by Founders Fund, at an 18.2x annualized revenue multiple.
The next month, in July, Ramp announced another $500 million of funding at $22.5 billion, led by ICONIQ, at 24x revenue.
Even at this price, my friend Logan Bartlett, a Managing Director at Redpoint who’s led the firm’s investments in Ramp, has no desire to sell. Is there a price at which he would be interested in selling? $200 billion.
The pace at which Ramp raises can seem overwhelming, but it’s deeply rational. Instead of raising dilutive, multi-billion dollar rounds every couple of years, they raise more frequently in smaller chunks.
It’s not how most companies do it, but it’s how you’d do it if you were a Time Company, if you were confident that the growth would continue.
Plus, the fundraising announcements actually contribute to the growth; Eric told me that each raise contributes to an uplift in excitement, which shows up in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) and ultimately, in closed won customers (CW). There’s some “efficient frontier of fundraising,” he half-joked, and no company rides it better than Ramp.
Already, with today’s announcement of $1 billion in annualized revenue, the price looks a little cheaper. In time, it will look cheaper still. In fact, last quarter, Ramp had its fastest growth quarter in a year. This quarter is on pace to beat it.
As Amin at Founders Fund put it, “Ramp should exit 2025 growing faster than it did in 2024, at effectively double the scale. That is very, very rare. And they’re generating cash.”
It’s like solar cost curves: even optimistic forecasts prove not to be optimistic enough.
This is hard to grok, even for those whose job it is to analyze and write about these things. Just yesterday, after I’d written the full draft of this Deep Dive, Anita Ramaswamy at The Information wrote an article arguing that because Ramp is a fintech, and not a SaaS company, “investors are at risk of overvaluing” it.
Ramaswamy made some classic mistakes.
First: understanding Ramp’s business model, which is evolving as it adds new products. The company expects to to have over 30% of its contribution profit come from SaaS, Bill Pay, Treasury, Procurement, Travel, and more by the end of the year.
Not all gross revenue is created equal. Because Ramp keeps more of its gross revenue than many other fintechs, and because it has added higher-margin products like Plus and Travel, it generates operating cash flow on its $1 billion in annualized gross revenue.
Second: comparing Ramp’s current revenue multiple to public companies’ next twelve months’ estimated revenue:
Ramp’s latest fundraising implies [Ramp is] hitting those software-like margins. Fortune reported the company’s $1 billion in annualized revenue last week. At Ramp’s latest valuation, that means investors are paying more than 22 times revenue for the company. That is well above the roughly 13 times next 12 months’ estimated revenue that software companies ServiceNow and Rubrik, with 70% gross margins, trade at.
Third (and most classically): underestimating Ramp’s growth:
Still, even assuming Ramp grows at, say, 50%, for another year, it would still be expensive. At the $22.5 billion valuation, its multiple would be around 15 times, higher than Rubrik and ServiceNow.
Ramp does not expect to grow just 50% over the next year, and it certainly doesn’t plan to stop growing after that. If Ramp continues at its current pace, it’s trading at a discount to the 13x NTM revenue multiple investors are paying for Rubrik and ServiceNow, two businesses that have guided towards much lower NTM revenue growth rates: 34% and 20%, respectively.
It made me happy to read that article because it proved that Ramp is still misunderstood, which means I still have a job to do. Today, we will work to understand.
The thing about Ramp is that it continues to grow faster, for longer, than people expect, and the business continues to get stronger and more durable with time.
We talk about time as if it’s one thing, as if it marches on unimpeded, unchangeable, even though we know that that’s not how time works.
As an object moves faster, its time appears to slow down. If I sent you to a distant planet and back on a spaceship flying at 99% of the speed of light, and you experienced ten years on the ship, I would be dead by the time you got back. From my perspective, your 10-year journey would have taken 70 years. Einstein grokked this.
Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time, goes even further. He argues that time as we experience it is not fundamental to the universe's structure; it emerges from more basic physical processes and our particular perspective as observers within the system. “The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion,” he writes, “an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.”
Less trippily, but perhaps more immediately alarmingly, Gurwinder wrote in a recent substack, How Social Media Shortens Your Life, that spending time on social media speeds up our sense of time and effectively shortens our lives.
Time is more malleable than most of us normally consider.
Ramp, more than any other company I know, considers time’s malleability. Its recipe is a blend of three flavors of time:
Saving Time
Compounding Over Time
Fighting Time
It builds products that save customers time. These products compound over time, and strengthen each other. And as an organization, Ramp is designed to fight the entropy that normally comes with time.
Understanding those three flavors of time, then, is the best way I’ve found to understand Ramp.
One of the reasons that Ramp has been able to grow so fast for so long, as Eric will readily admit, is that it is playing in an almost bottomlessly large market.
Even after all of the growth to date, “98.5% of businesses in America don’t use Ramp’s core product,” Eric is happy to point out, “and that number is misleading, because nearly 100% don’t use the additional products Ramp is building. So our real market share is closer to 0%.”
There are roughly 15 million businesses in the United States, 3.5 million of which have five or more full-time employees, 2.8 million of which use cards. Ramp serves just north of 45,000 of them. Visa estimates that businesses in the US spend >$40 trillion per year, of which $2.1 trillion is spent on cards.
According to Visa, there is $145 trillion of annual business spend up for grabs globally. Money itself is the largest TAM there is. Visa, relevantly, wrote, “In the $145 trillion of B2B, go spend time with like the function inside your company that is doing buyer supplier payments, and you will just, you might be surprised at how much manual work is still going on there.”
But entering an existing market that large is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it is large. There is room for growth, and for many winners.
On the other hand, it is competitive. There are many competitors chasing that growth. AmEx is a $230 billion business. JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, is an $835 billion business. Other startups are fighting for that growth, too.
As Ramp investor Peter Thiel famously wrote in Zero to One, “Competition is for losers.”
And yet…
As we’ve covered since the beginning, when Eric and Karim set out to figure out what to build next, they realized that while the corporate card market seemed saturated, there were two wide open attack vectors:
Saving Customers Money. This was classic counter-positioning. Since card companies make more money the more money their customers spend, they’re all incentivized to get customers to spend more, so they offer points and rewards. But businesses do better if they spend more efficiently, so what if you built a business that helped them do that?
Saving Customers Time. Existing card companies, even startups, were sales and marketing-driven. There was an opportunity to build a product and engineering-driven financial software company, starting with a card, whose products helped companies get back the one thing they can’t buy more of: time.
Those vectors are related. Plowing interchange revenue (the ~2% card companies make when you use their card to pay) back into better software instead of points and rewards meant that Ramp could use the card as a wedge into all sorts of products that help save time and money, which, as a product and engineering-company, they were best-positioned to build.
This is a surprisingly deep insight.
One of my favorite ways to spot an exceptional founder is to see how deep down all of their industry’s rabbit holes they’re able to go. Sometimes, when you talk to Eric, or hear him speak on a podcast, because he’s so nice, you can forget how sharp he is.
But when we were chatting the other day, and I asked him what he’s been able to learn from AmEx about building a brand, he went deep. If you’ll allow me the slight digression, I think it’s a useful glimpse into how Eric and Ramp think.
In a 2007 speech at the Economic Club, former AmEx CEO (and current Ramp investor) Ken Chenault shared an important idea that Eric has taken to heart: great companies understand that their product and their brand are separate things. The products you sell work in service of the brand you promise.
“Many once-great companies lost to time” - there it is again - “thought they were selling products and things – and you do want to sell amazing things that work well and make peoples’ lives better - but the once-great got lost in the form factor, in being the finest horse and buggy manufacturer when the car came,” Eric said.
AmEx has been around for nearly 170 years and started as a pony express.
“What does horse-driven delivery have to do with cards and points?” he asked.
“They weren’t selling spots on the back of a horse-drawn carriage. They were selling trust.”
The thing that you wanted to transport, or the money that you wanted to move, was going to get there. You could count on American Express to deliver it for you.
Then came travelers' cheques. Even in a strange, foreign land, you could trust that with AmEx, your money would work.
Then came credit cards. Anywhere you go, AmEx will make sure your money works.
Now it’s worth 60x what it was four decades ago, because it’s evolved its products to meet the standard of its brand.
“Think about the brand over time,” he said. “In the ‘80s, ‘Membership has its privileges.’”
“Today, ‘Powerful Backing.’ There’s always been this element of trust, and of ego. Wherever you are, you know that AmEx has got your back, that membership matters, and that you can always count on AmEx.”
Think about the experience of calling AmEx as a member since 1997.
“You’ll call, and you won’t wait, and someone will be on the other end of the line, and they’ll say, ‘Hello, Mr. McCormick. Thank you for being a member since 1997.’ That’s cachet.”
The idea that “you matter more here,” he said, is a big part of the AmEx brand.
AmEx’s is an ‘80s idea of luxury: “The Bentley, the Platinum Card. Of course they pick up your call, get you the best table, get you cool tickets. It’s almost an old-world luxury, Mad Men luxury.”
“But I would argue,” and I had not yet realized that this was going to be an essay on time, or, therefore obviously, discussed it with Eric, “this idea is sort of stuck in time.”
What Ramp realized, and AmEx didn’t, is that time changes, and time is different now than it was in the 1980s.
“What’s changed,” Eric said, “is that now there’s a constant assault on your time.”
On a Saturday morning in the ‘80s, no one could call your cell phone – you didn’t have one. Now they can. Emails can get you. Notifications on social media can get you. Work is always there with you, in your pocket.
Things just keep piling up, and people want things that help them fight back.
“It was luxurious back then to be able to call and have AmEx solve a problem for you. Now, it’s more luxurious not to have to call in the first place.”
“Not having to do an expense report, having the tedious stuff done for you so you can actually live your life. Trust and luxury are good, but you need to understand what luxury actually is today. Luxury today is time.”
Since Ramp was founded in 2019, though, AmEx’s stock has tripled, even though if you look at the AmEx website in the Wayback Machine, and look at the products and cards they were selling then, they’re the same as when Ramp was founded.
What happened was that AmEx got serious about consumer rewards and lost focus on business customers: Resy reservations, CLEAR, WalMart+, hotel credits, live events. They upped their annual membership fee from $540 to $695 and … practically no one left. The money just dropped to their bottom line. Today, they’re booking millions of tables per week. If you want to go to the US Open in style, or to Carbone, you need AmEx Platinum. They reinvented themselves as a consumer membership company, refocused on who they were, and it turned out incredibly well.
Practically, for Ramp, this means they entered a seemingly crowded Corporate Card market, but what they found was a large market with no one else focused on the new luxury that is time.
And if you look at the other categories that Ramp has expanded into, the same thing is true. In expense management, SAP bought Concur in 2009 and left it somewhere near the bottom of the priority stack. If you’ve used Concur, it is not focused on saving you time. In Bill Pay, you know how I feel about bill.com, and my sentiment is not, “Wow, these guys save me a lot of time.” There are countless other companies in these categories owned by PE and more focused on near-term bottom line than on saving customers time.
With trillions of dollars of market cap and tens of trillions of dollars of spend on the line, Ramp keeps finding markets surprisingly bereft of competitors focused on the thing they believed matters most to businesses: time.
Enduring companies don’t confuse the product with the brand. They build products in service of the brand promise. Ramp’s brand promise is that it will save businesses time. So they build products to do just that.
When we spoke recently, Karim reiterated this point. It was the first thing he said:
“For every product we build, and everything we do, the goal is always, ‘How can we save more time for customers?’”
“Even in very early Ramp, when we built our mobile app…” he said, “think about mobile apps built at the time. They were all about trying to get MAUs and DAUs. That might be right for social media, but we had the totally opposite metric: how can people spend as little time as possible in the app? When someone clicks in the app, what are they trying to do, and how can we make that faster?”
Diego Zaks, Ramp’s VP of Design, says that the company’s goal remains for its customers to NOT spend time on Ramp. They benchmark against this internally: how much time are customers spending on the platform and how can we consistently make that go down over time? The goal is that the more powerful Ramp becomes, the less time you spend on it. This is where AI comes in and is why they’re so focused on agentic work.
“This is true for all of the new products we build,” Karim went on.
It started with Card and Expense Management. If your expense management software was tied to your card, could see each transaction, you can turn “a complicated guessing problem into a simpler matching problem” and save hours of back and forth. As a result of that and many improvements since, Ramp can reduce the time it takes to submit an expense report by 98%.
Today, Ramp’s Policy Agents can proactively review expenses based on a company’s expense policy and merchant details, and either make recommendations to human approvers or approve all of the in-policy expenses and only elevate questionable ones to humans. So far they can eliminate human review for 85-90% of them, and the product just launched two months ago.
These seem like small things, but if you’ve had to submit or approve expense reports, or god forbid had to chase down employees to submit receipts, you know how much time this stuff takes - both directly and indirectly, in lost focus. This is an issue for everyone, at every level, even for very expensive people.
Susan Li, Meta’s CFO, told John Collison on a recent episode of Cheeky Pint that the company is looking into ways to automate rote operational work, “and I say this as a person who is like a very expensive machine learning model for approving expenses. I'm not certain that when I approve expenses I'm really adding a lot of deep human intelligence to this process. I'm scanning for a fairly checklistable set of things. And yet I get multiple expenses every day.”
Susan Li’s reported total compensation in 2024 was $27.2 million. Assuming she works something like 70 hours per week, each hour she spends doing expenses costs the company north of $7,000. More importantly, she makes that money because she’s one of the best in the world at doing the non-expense-report-approval parts of her job. Every hour she spends doing an expense report is an hour that she is not spending on more strategic work, on decisions that could move the $2 trillion company’s market cap by tens of billions of dollars.
Then there is the strife, which we have talked about since the beginning of Ramp, caused by the finance team needing to chase down employees to submit their expenses. This is so prevalent that Ramp focused on receipt chasing in its first non-Super Bowl national TV commercial:
And as an Eagles fan, Lord knows I don’t want to pull Saquon Barkley off the field to do expense reports.
These commercials are resonating for the simple reason that Eric and Karim were right: people care a lot more about saving time than other card and expense management companies appreciated.
It is telling that Bryan Johnson, the man behind the Don’t Die movement, runs his company Blueprint on Ramp. Even the man who plans to live forever doesn’t want to waste time filing receipts.
But card and expense management weren’t the only timesucks in the finance org, so next, Ramp added Bill Pay, then Procurement, then Travel, then Treasury. Ramp’s mid-market and enterprise software solution, Plus, adds more power and automation to each of these products, through traditional software features that enterprises need, and increasingly through Agents.
I’ve written about these products before, in Ramping Up, and about how building AI into their workflows will move from saving time to just doing the work, in Ramp & the AI Opportunity. I’ll tell you how those business lines are doing in the next section, but the point for now is that each one saves companies time and money, and they save even more time and money when used together.
Bill Pay can process invoices with 99% accuracy from an email forward, collect approvals, pay right from Card, Treasury, or external accounts, and sync them with your accounting software.
Travel lets employees book flights or hotels that are within policy for their specific level (the CEO might be able to fly first class, the analyst premium economy), can stop out-of-policy bookings on the Card before they ever go through, and then turn everything spent on the card during the trip into one Expense Report.
Karim told me that Ramp can take expense, AP, travel, and procurement policies from customers in whatever written form they’re in, automatically map them into the Ramp system, and start doing things like evaluating every invoice for whether it’s in-policy nearly immediately. This means that companies don’t just save time once Ramp is up and running; they start saving time during implementation.
I asked Google Gemini to “Analyze data from G2, Capterra, and implementation partner reports on the average setup and implementation time for SAP Concur, Coupa, and NetSuite versus Ramp. Express the difference in business days and required personnel,” in a fresh chat, with no mention that I was writing about Ramp. I tried to make it rough but unbiased. This is what it came back with:
The upshot is that by maniacally focusing on saving businesses time and money, Ramp has been successful in saving businesses time and money. Per the company, to date, it has saved businesses $10 billion and 27.5 million hours.
That brings us to one last thing that’s important to note, on the subject of Saving Time, which will bridge us into our second flavor, Compounding Over Time.
Those $10 billion and 27.5 million hour numbers are so large in aggregate as to be hard to pin meaning to. But they’re an aggregate of the time and money savings of many individual companies, each of which Ramp has data on, and each of which Ramp is focused on saving more time and money for.
What that data means is that Ramp can use what it’s learned to sell to new accounts and expand within existing ones.
For new accounts, by understanding how many credit cards the company would use, how much money it might spend, and how many expense reports it might submit, it can walk in the door knowing how much time and money it could save the company with just card and expense management.
Next-generation card controls that “surgically and automatically block non-compliant, out-of-policy transactions at the point of purchase, prior to payment” save customers anywhere from 3.5-8.8% in prevented spend. If you’re spending $10 million per year, that’s $350-880k saved.
Spend request workflows that decide who can spend and how much, set default limits for each employee, and approve new funds on a per-request basis reduce spend another 1.7-4.6%, for $170-460k.
Expense automations that reduce time spent on expense reports by 98% can save a company that submits 10,000 expense reports per year over 3,000 hours, or more than an employee and a half’s worth of time.
From the jump, the ROI is clear: save $500k - $1.4 million, and 1.5 employees’ time, per year.
This is true for expansion within existing accounts, too. Karim told me, because Ramp has so much data on how each of its customers spends and operates, and on how all of its customers spend and operate, its Account Managers can go to their accounts and say, “We know you process this many bills and spend this much time on procurement, but if you started using Ramp this way, or set up this feature, this is how much time you’d save. And your time is valuable, so the ROI is there.”
For a product that lands with a card, which makes money on interchange, provides software for free, and demonstrates such clear savings once it gets to work, adding other Ramp products becomes a no-brainer.
Roy Luo, a General Partner at ICONIQ, which led Ramp’s last $500 million round at a $22.5 billion valuation, told me that the resonance of this value proposition is one of the things that jumped out to him in talking to Ramp’s customers.
“I can’t tell you the number of times customers would say, ‘I can’t believe this stuff is free,” he said. “I loved Ramp because they’re an application and AI platform monetizing through a card, but the card was never really the product. It’s genius, super smart; it reduces a lot of barriers to sell and win.”
But the card is just the entry point. In my first Deep Dive on Ramp, I wrote, “The corporate card, then, is a Trojan Horse directly into a company’s finances.”
The idea that time is the new luxury, that you could build a really big business really quickly by saving companies time and money, is an excellent starting point and strong counter-positioning. But translating that idea into a web of specific products, people, go-to-market motions, and implementations is how you compound over time.
That Ramp has grown incredibly fast to this point is not up for debate. It is growing at a speed for its scale that very few companies ever have.
But it’s hard to look at the landscape of early stage venture-backed companies today and believe that growth is invariably good, or that it will inevitably last. In many instances, although it’s never fully clear which until after the fact, investors pay high prices for growth that has already occurred, when the very pace of that growth contains the seeds of its deceleration.
This is the question that I wanted to discuss with Eric when we spoke about doing this piece: the durability of Ramp’s growth.
I come into all of these Ramp Deep Dives excited about the company. That’s why I’ve written so many of them. Ramp is a special one, and it moves so fast that I learn something new each time.
There is also a point in the process of writing each of these at which I get even more excited about the company. Something clicks. In Ramp’s Double-Unicorn Rounds, it was the company’s velocity and trajectory, the realization I opened this essay with, that if a company is growing fast enough, seemingly insane valuations soon become sane. In Ramping Up, it was that transactions are jumping off points for new applications; that, for example, when companies spend on Travel on the card, it puts Ramp in position to build a better Travel product. In Ramp & the AI Opportunity, it was that a company built to save time and money was perfectly positioned to take advantage of incorporating AI into its workflows; built well, and paired with the ability to pay, AI could just do a lot of the work.
This time, what’s clicked for me is Ramp’s unusual combination of velocity and durability, that the business is built to compound at high speeds for a long time.
What’s amazed me across these opportunities to study Ramp is just how consistent and fruitful the core idea has been, and how each passing year adds new layers and S-Curves that move in that same direction.
John Coogan, the co-host of TBPN and long-time Ramp supporter, told me that one of the most underappreciated things about Ramp is that they’ve avoided “launching slop product extensions by basically trusting how big that one core thing can be.” That means that instead of wasting energy on short-term shiny new things, Ramp can focus all of its energy in one direction, on compounding on the core.
When I asked Calvin how they’ve managed to be so consistent, he brought up a word that I’ve never heard a company use to describe itself: correctness.
“The founders and leaders and Ramp are still paranoid about quality and velocity, and also about correctness,” he said.
I asked him to tell me more, because correctness seems like something that every company just kind of automatically wants. If a value is only useful if someone else might hold the opposite value, it’s hard to imagine a company valuing incorrectness. What makes correctness practical at Ramp?
“Everyone wants to be correct, but not everyone is smart enough to be correct,” Calvin explained. “But there’s a process version of this”:
For example, there’s a bad version of move fast and break things where you just spasm. It’s important to think before you code. We have a core principle around scoping: a short but decisive process to make sure you build something that a customer actually wants to use. To waste all of that engineering time would be downright tragic. So we try to avoid those sorts of things.
Avoiding stupidity is a lot easier than seeking brilliance. We are good at calling out when things are idiotic. Karim is particularly good at this. We have a good culture of internal debate.
It comes down to having smart people who care and work hard. You can be more correct by doing more work. Also, just caring. When people are bold and wrong once, we respect it a little. But you keep it up and we’re just going to remember you were wrong.
Talking to Calvin and starting to write this section, I realized that one of the reasons I’m so drawn to Ramp, and one of the reasons I keep writing about it, is that it is the perfect real-time case study of the argument I made in In Defense of Strategy.
I wrote In Defense of Strategy in July 2023, when AI companies were starting to grow really fast out of the gate, and when a sentiment started to grow alongside them: that strategy was for wimps, and that speed of execution was the only thing that mattered.
I disagreed, arguing that “companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the only ones that have a shot.”
“The better you are at execution,” I wrote, “the faster you can run in any direction. A good strategy helps you run fast in the right direction.”
Plenty of companies have executed their way into a good strategy - they got a bunch of smart people in a room, tried a lot of things, listened to customers, learned, and iterated towards the right strategy, against which they then executed.
That can work, although executing without a strategy means that you are forced to make a trade-off: either you can grow fast and then realize what you’ve built is not defensible, obliterating the value of your startup, or you can bounce around more slowly until you get to something that can grow fast, defensibly.
But you can’t do what Ramp has done – grow both fast and durably, from Day 1 – without both forming a clear strategy and executing against it at high velocity.
In that same Strategy essay, I tried to show why strategy - a diagnosis (there is an opening for a financial software company that helps customers save time and money), a guiding policy (“For every product we build, and everything we do, the goal is always, ‘How can we save more time for customers?’”), and coherent actions (all of the specific things Ramp does to save customers time and money) - means bigger, more durable companies, faster.
Startups have an “uncertainty window” - a period during which what they’re doing is uncertain enough that others won’t copy - which can be extended by what Hamilton Helmer calls counter-positioning, “the practice of developing your business model such that incumbents have conflicting incentives preventing them to compete effectively.” For Ramp, that was saving time and money instead of offering points and rewards.
During this uncertainty window, they can either use a limited set of coherent actions to aimlessly execute – the “bad version of move fast and break things where you just spasm” - or use them strategically, in one direction, such that they compound: “A good diagnosis and guiding policy channels and coordinates those limited actions so that they can compound on each other.”
Execution and velocity are important. By moving fast, Ramp earned more actions during its uncertainty window, and earns more actions in any given time period now that it’s moved outside of the uncertainty window. But it is the fact that these actions are coherent, guided by correctness, that lets them compound into a business that gets more durable with time.
It is unsurprising that Ramp, a company that counts the days since its founding (today is Day 2,367), understands this better than anyone.
Which is an easy claim to make, but I understand if you won’t simply believe me without the numbers.
The best way to think about Ramp’s business is as a series of S-Curves, each of which compounds on the others and, because Ramp has focused on releasing core, non-slop products, each of which enhances the others.
As I wrote in Ramping Up, “A typical S-Curve describes the idea that a product’s growth normally starts slow, accelerates for a period of time, and inevitably slows down at maturity once it’s saturated the market. It looks something like this.”
Card is Ramp’s first S-Curve, and it is still in the growth phase. By picking the competitive but massive corporate card market as its first market, Ramp picked a market in which it could grow for a very long time.
As of July, Card had over 45,000 active customers and is growing through both new customers and through increased spend among existing customers. It is an impressive and compounding business in its own right.
But in that same March 2022 Deep Dive, I wrote that “as Ramp’s first major non-card product, Bill Pay has the potential to build the next S-Curve for the business.”
Bill Pay has realized that potential. It is the next S-Curve.
Roy at ICONIQ, who has studied and invested in this space for over a decade, told me that what Ramp has been able to do with Bill Pay is very rare.
“In the world of Office of the CFO tech,” he explained, “there are very few companies that have truly captured lightning in a bottle twice organically. Everyone else bought their way into the next act. But Bill Pay is very special. To have the success that product has had, you would have had to study the space for a decade to appreciate how hard it is to do this twice, organically.”
Over the past year, Bill Pay’s TPV has tripled and is now higher than Card.
Across Bill Pay and Card, Ramp is now at $100 billion in TPV, almost double where they were in March ($55 billion) and 10x higher than the $10 billion in TPV the company reached in January 2023. Put another way, in the over two years from January 2023 to March 2025, Ramp grew TPV by $40 billion. They increased TPV by more than that - $45 billion - in the past six months.
It makes sense that Bill Pay is growing faster, and getting bigger, than Card. Recall that of the greater than $40 trillion businesses in America spend, only $2.1 trillion, well under 10%, is spent on cards. Money moves through invoices.
Within Ramp specifically, Bill Pay also benefits from Ramp’s existing customer relationships. “Bill Pay and Card are both on the payables side, they’re expense related” Roy pointed out. “So there are natural synergies to the budget, wallet, people, and champions you sell into. If the guy down the hall loves the Card product, it makes selling Bill Pay more natural.”
This is one of the sneaky advantages to Coogan’s point about focusing on the core. It means you are often talking to the same buyer, who already loves the product they use with you. It means Ramp’s Account Managers already have trust when they say, “If you start using Bill Pay in this way, we can save you this many million dollars and this many hundred hours.”
That shows up in the attach rates. Bill Pay specifically is used by one in three Ramp Card customers, and that number is both beating plan and growing. Roy called Bill Pay’s attach rates “absolutely insane,” when something like 10-15% attach rates would be very good.
This is how S-Curves compound.
And Ramp keeps adding S-Curves.
Ramp Plus is a natural fit with Card and Bill Pay. It provides software that gives customers more of the functionality they need to save time and money, including many of the agentic products that Ramp is rolling out.
Launched in July 2023, Ramp Plus is newer than Card and Bill Pay, and it is growing even faster. It is an early proof point of the company’s thesis, which Eric expressed in our last Deep Dive, that being in the business of making other businesses more profitable can be very valuable.
Plus also makes Ramp’s business stronger and more diverse. It is the first Ramp product that looks like a traditional software product: recurring revenue, software gross margins.
Even newer and faster-growing are Treasury and Travel.
Treasury, launched January 2025, has already exceeded $1.5 billion in assets under management.
With Treasury, Ramp has “woven cash management into your AP workflow, so every dollar you’re not spending is earning — automatically.” The bet is that companies will want to keep at least some of their cash where they spend it, so that Ramp can maximize the time that it’s earning yield and customers can save time making money.
And Ramp can also help companies spend that money smarter.
Travel, launched in June 2024, has grown booking volume 6x YoY. Ramp monetizes this volume through commissions, like traditional online travel agencies (OTAs), with OTA-like margins.
With Procurement, as more Ramp customers spend through Ramp, it can help them spend smarter by applying what they’ve learned about what companies are paying for products, and by streamlining workflows.
On top of all of these S-Curves, Ramp is adding in agentic AI to the AI that has powered the products behind the scenes.
The goal is to understand the work being done, and have multiple agents get to work on it in parallel to get it done faster.
We will discuss this further in “Fighting Time” below, but it hints to another way that Ramp compounds: the more customers it has using more products, the better it can understand their business and the more actions it can take on the business’ behalf, which means more time and money saved. That means more revenue, contribution profit, and cash flow, and it also means stickier customers.
All told, over 50% of Ramp’s customers now use two or more Ramp products, and multi-product adoption is ramping faster, too.
This has all sorts of implications for the durability, scale, and speed of Ramp’s business.
First, and most simply, customers who use multiple products are stickier. This is true for most businesses; what makes Ramp unique is just how quickly customers adopt multiple products.
Second, if you believe Ramp’s premise that saving customers time and money creates healthier customers, then customers that use multiple Ramp products will stay in business longer and grow faster, which lowers churn and increases LTV.
Third, when customers use more products, their LTV increases, which means you can spend more to acquire them, which means you grow faster and beat point solutions.
Eric explained the logic:
Take a customer in any product category: Card and Expense Management, Bill Pay, Travel. If you think you will be able to cross-sell, then you can outspend any point solution to acquire them. It is totally rational to pay $3k to acquire a customer that a point solution can only spend $2k to acquire. That’s when the flywheel really starts getting going.
When you combine fast-growing maturing S-Curves with faster-growing new S-Curves, you can maintain high growth at scale.
“If you look at our TPV YoY growth, a year ago, we were growing 2.4x,” Eric said. “This year, we are growing 2.4x. At any point in time, we’re growing just as fast off a much larger base.”
As the business grows, its mix does, too, and the business gets stronger. At the end of 2023, less than 5% of Ramp’s run rate contribution profit (RR CP) was non-Card, at the end of 2024, roughly 20% was non-Card, and the company expects that roughly a third of RR CP will be non-Card at the end of this year.
If there’s one thing people remember from Thiel’s Zero to One, it’s that idea that “Competition is for losers.” Ramp has shown that competition can be fine; if you’re competing on the right dimension in a large enough market, it can actually be a good thing. People are familiar with cards. That makes them an easier entry point. From there, by proving that it’s able to save time and money, Ramp can expand to new products, making the business stronger as it grows.
Instead, Eric said, there are two important ideas from Zero to One, although most people focus on the first part. Since the value of a company is based on the present value of things that will happen many years in the future:
Growth is more important than most people think, even though people think growth is important.
Growth is conditioned on the durability of it.
As Thiel wrote:
The overwhelming importance of future profits is counterintuitive, even in Silicon Valley. For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure [emphasis Thiel’s], but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?
In its sixth year, Ramp is proving that it is both fast-growing and durable. That all comes back to saving time.
“On the surface, it looks like Ramp is selling money,” Eric said. “But Ramp sells time. Books that close themselves, expenses that do themselves, money that flows to higher yield. Money is a great way to make money, but it’s hard to sell. It’s better to sell time. It’s bad to have your best salesperson doing expense reports. It’s cheaper to hire Ramp to do it.”
“What’s core for Ramp is: do you love the product? If you do, and we get more of your spend, we get a natural take: store more funds, move more money, enable more software actions on it. We can monetize through software, or through your next business trip, take a little interchange and a commission.”
If Ramp saves customers time, then over time, it wins more of their business. Counterintuitively, that means that it can grow faster, and do even more for each customer, which spins the flywheel faster. This is how you build a business that compounds over time by saving customers time.
On its current trajectory, it seems that Ramp will still be around a decade from now, and that it will be a much bigger business than it is today.
But Ramp itself is growing. It has over 1,200 employees now. And while time allows for compounding, it also invites sclerosis.
In order for time to work with you, you have to fight to ensure it doesn’t work against you.
There is a tension that comes with time, one that comes for all companies: time creates entropy. Companies get bigger. They hire more people. They have more to lose. So they respond with bureaucracy. More meetings. More stringent approval processes. Those things compound, too. And as a result, they get slower. They lose the thing that got them there in the first place. They become a Big Company.
This is a well-known phenomenon that, despite the fact that excellent startups with phenomenal leaders are aware of it and actively try to fight it, still comes for the best companies.
The core essay in Fred Brooks’ 1975 The Mythical Man-Month explains Brook’s Law: adding people to late software projects makes them even later, because communication overhead grows exponentially with team size. I remember Ben Nevile, Breather’s CTO, drawing these graphs with a Sharpie to demonstrate the point.
My friend Alex Komoroske made a presentation titled Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Mold while working as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe after spending thirteen years at Google. Two companies that, at their founding, would be two of the companies you would have bet would avoid the scaling sclerosis, and yet, from the inside, he said, “This happens in every successful organization over time.”
It’s worth flipping through the 160 slide presentation (it’s quick). It shows that even with the most well-intentioned, talented, and team-oriented people, the math just works against a project’s success the bigger it gets.
That Ramp, at 1,200 people and $1 billion in annualized revenue across multiple product lines, seems to have avoided this fate thus far, then, is remarkable and worthy of study.
When you do, it actually makes a lot of sense: Ramp is entirely focused on saving companies time and money, and it applies many of the things that it does in service of that goal to Ramp itself.
There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg here: is Ramp so intensely focused on making itself more efficient because its mission is to make other companies more efficient, or do both come from the same egg, Eric and Karim’s obsession with saving time and money, first for consumers, then for businesses, and for Ramp itself?
Whichever way you resolve the paradox, Ramp wants to make an example of Ramp. In a recent company all-hands, Ramp reminded the team of a goal it set for itself in January:
And they reminded them of what that would look like:
How Ramp runs itself, then, optimistically, is a preview of what well-run companies might look like in the future, if things go right: more productive big companies behaving like small companies.
So how do they do it?
When I spoke to Karim, I asked him this question explicitly: “How do you avoid getting slow and bureaucratic as you get bigger?”
His answer was simple: “By reducing the cost of coordination as much as possible.”
Then he gave me a hypothetical example.
When you think about the procurement workflow at a lot of companies, you have this chain of jobs that needs to get done to achieve an outcome. Step 1: fill out this form. Step 2: legal review. Step 3: IT review. Etc…
The problem is that the IT person might be on vacation, or legal only finds out about the form two days later. Time is wasted because chaining is inherently slow. This rhymes with a point that Komoroske makes in Coordination Headwinds: each step in the chain reduces the project’s overall probability of success, because people are human. “But of course humans aren’t robots,” he wrote, pre-ChatGPT.
The reason, Karim said, that you don’t just run all of these processes in parallel – legal review, IT review, etc… – is that peoples’ time is very expensive. You don’t want to run an IT review on something that ends up failing legal review. It’s a waste of time and money.
But what about agents? If the marginal cost of an agent’s time is practically zero, why not just have six different agents run the process immediately and in parallel? Then, something that took weeks could take minutes. These time savings compound, too.
That was a hypothetical example. Then, he gave me three real ones.
Ramp’s product and engineering teams, which we talk about in every piece because of their absurd shipping velocity, have gotten even faster with agents. Today, Ramp’s engineers are more than 50% more productive than they were in 2024, as measured by commits per engineer.
Coding has been AI’s breakout use case in the enterprise. Just yesterday, Cognition announced a new $10.2 billion valuation. It is unsurprising that Ramp is taking advantage of engineering productivity gains.
What is more remarkable, and speaks to Ramp’s potential to make entire organizations more efficient, is that Ramp has been able to bring these efficiency gains to its entire organization.
Take marketing, which now reports into Karim. “Before I jumped into marketing,” he said, “I applied the Elon algorithm (1. Make requirements less dumb, 2. Delete the part or process, 3. Simplify and optimize, 4. Accelerate cycle time, and 5. Automate.) What are the different steps?”
Take briefs, he said. When people wanted brand or creative work, the brand team had one interface: write me a brief. They all had the same format, they were reviewed once a week by the team, and during that review, 1-2 people would decide how to allocate the team’s limited resources.
“No matter what you wanted to do in marketing, anything at all,” he recalled, “it would take a week, even if it takes less time to do the thing than write the brief.”
Say you’re on the SEO team, generating a lot of articles…
It’s crazy that you need to write a brief for each one. What if you took the process the brand team follows and turned it into software, a tool that you give to everyone in marketing, so when anyone wants to generate an image, video, colors, fonts, etc… they can do that on their own? So we built that. If something reaches a certain level of virality, great, humans can go and polish the last 20%. But basic assets are completely unblocked.
Then he gave me my favorite example, about a lunch.
A couple of months ago, Karim was trying to book a lunch for the Applied AI team. He asked his EA to set it up, and two days later, when he hadn’t heard anything, he asked what was going on. His EA said she was waiting on legal review. He asked, “Reviewing what?”
Turns out, because the booking was over a certain size, the restaurant sent over a legal contract. “It was very basic, and my mind immediately went to, ‘This is ridiculous. Why are we doing this?’”
So he worked with the legal team, and now for things like this, Ramp just auto-signs and sends an addendum to the counterparty, puts the ball back in their court. “Most people just say: this is fine, we just had to do the contract, we’re not going to argue on the details.”
This is a little example, but in a growing company, there are thousands of these little examples, and not only do they add up, they compound. If the legal team is working on the restaurant contract, they’re not working on something more important. If marketing is waiting on a brief, they’re not acquiring that next customer, wasting precious days until that customer signs up for a Card, then Bill Pay, then, with 99% probability, becomes a customer for a long time.
Technology can help. AI, specifically, can help, by doing a bunch of the routine work that a lot of people end up doing because they have to but don’t love doing, like briefs and lunch contracts, like expense reports.
But knowing where to apply AI in the first place takes people who are obsessed with this.
“I don’t know if we’d want to put this in the piece,” Calvin told me, making me really want to put it in the piece, “but Karim has a hobby of huddling the teams at 2am. When we need to get something done, Eric calls me on the weekends, and we make it happen. They still care about the outcomes; that’s the most fundamental thing.”
Ramp cares more about the outcomes than the things that big companies typically care about, like looking good to others in the industry, or doing things “the right way.” Being wrong is OK, as long as you’re wrong fast. “The secret to building great products faster,” Eric said, “is to reduce cycle time.” Diego says it well here:
In each one of these pieces, I ask Redpoint MD Logan Bartlett for his take. Normally, they’re outlandish, like “I don’t want to be quoted saying Ramp is the perfect B2B company because that’s ridiculous… but it is” or “I won’t sell for less than $200b” (although, respect).
This time, though, he was also more serious. He shared why he thinks Ramp has been able to avoid the ravages of time:
As companies get bigger, there’s more and more of a need to get things right when they ship a product. The expectations are higher than that of a start-up and so are the stakes. You have brand credibility associated with this new thing and so you want so badly to get it right because you don’t want to dilute how you’re perceived. Elements of the classic innovators dilemma.. and yet Ramp doesn’t care? Or hasn’t fallen victim to it?
They hire people who care about excellence but they’re willing to try and fail on stuff which allows them to succeed. This coupled with entrepreneurially hiring and autonomy seem to me to be the secret sauce of acting like a small disruptor at scale for Ramp.
This is why, for example, when he was already running one of the fastest-shipping product and engineering teams in tech, Karim stepped in and added marketing to his plate.
This is one of the most surprising changes since the last time I wrote about Ramp. When I was talking to Eric about sponsoring Not Boring last year, he looped in… Calvin, who I was not expecting to see on the marketing team.
Calvin was a founding engineer at Ramp, whose resumé, according to this tweet from Eric, included:
Admitted into MIT at age 16
Code running on the International Space Station
Top 20 in the country in the Putnam Math Competition
And here he was negotiating a small newsletter sponsorship deal.
When I asked Calvin what he was doing in marketing, he said that good marketing looks a lot like product building, structure-wise. “It has the same tripartite structure: Performance Marketing is Engineering, Brand Marketing is Design, and Product Marketing is… Product.”
When you put really great engineers in marketing, he continued, there’s a lot they can do.
In Ramp’s case, he said, “We have implemented AI everywhere we can: videos and good looking static content, without a drop in quality. We’ve really optimized targeting across channels. We run experiments day in and day out, with more rigor on the experimental side.”
When I asked Karim a similar question - why put engineers on marketing? - he cited “pragmatic problem solving.”
“One thing that’s really different now (with AI) is that the value of skill and subject matter expertise is now relatively lower than the value of will. It’s a lot easier to learn to do something now. If you really like an ad, you can write your new ad in the same style. Really, in marketing, we’re now a lot more focused on: you have an idea, you want to bring it to life, how do you do that as fast as possible? On the creative side, you can learn a lot from history if you’re more focused on results than on winning awards.”
One tangible outcome of this pragmatic approach is that Ramp’s marketing team is now much more focused on marketing to companies that don’t look like Ramp, the millions of non-venture-backed-fast-growing-tech-companies that drive a huge portion of the economy.
This is something that Amin at Founders Fund noted in our conversation.
“People in Silicon Valley are pretty obsessed with selling to other tech companies,” he said. “Ramp zagged, and said, ‘Let’s sell to people who don’t traditionally get this kind of love.’ Energy, education, home services, sports - areas that traditional Silicon Valley go-to-market (GTM) says, ‘Don’t focus on these areas.’”
And when Ramp goes in, Amin said, they go all-in. “Ramp has quintessential adaptability - adapt or die - where they see opportunity present itself and focus their bazooka of talent on seizing it.”
This is how, for example, Ramp made a Super Bowl ad in just seven days:
Targeting non-Silicon Valley companies means going all-in on non-Silicon Valley tactics, too.
Calvin calls this a “counterpositioning philosophy. If everyone is shifting their marketing to AI, think about the things that are going to stand out, the things that can’t be done with AI.”
Of course, Ramp’s engineering-led marketing team uses AI too, probably more heavily than most marketing teams. “Both extremes are good,” Calvin said. “Go heavy into AI, or into the things that AI will never replace.”
Targeting the non-tech market early is a way of fighting time, too. It’s an effort to get ahead of the fact that early adopters eventually dry up, that at some point, you need to cross the chasm. Ramp is leaping over it. With success in those harder-to-reach but larger markets, the compounding will continue more smoothly than it otherwise would.
All of this is true. Fighting time internally means that Ramp can continue to move fast long past the time when most companies begin to slow down. Fighting time externally - by understanding that even the most successful startups tend to briefly sputter out at $10 billion in revenue, once they’ve run out of the usual targets - means that Ramp can continue compounding far longer than most companies do.
But I think there’s something more going on here: Ramp actually just cares about saving time and money, about eliminating the bloat that weighs down companies, and weighs the economy down with them.
A few minutes after I got off my call with Karim the other day, he texted me a link to this tweet.
This is the kind of shit that drives him nuts.
On our call, he mentioned a different but related chart, this one that’s familiar to a lot of people in tech, a symbol for the idea that anything on which tech is allowed to work its magic gets cheaper over time, while every industry that lets bureaucracy win gets more and more expensive.
The chart he texted me afterwards was the “why.”
“Education and healthcare outcomes haven’t gotten better in the past twenty years. What are we spending on?” he asked. And answered: “Very little money is going to educators and doctors, but a lot is going to administrative bullshit.”
This is what time does, left to its own devices. It makes organizations grow. And as they grow, their coordination costs grow exponentially, and suddenly, the number of administrators in the healthcare system has grown 30x more than the number of physicians. More people to do more work created by having more people, ad infinitum. It is clearly unsustainable.
“This is really where we’re applying a lot of our expertise and product building,” Karim said. “How do we get 80-90% of the bullshit work to go down so that organizations can do the thing that they exist to do?”
Ramp, then, is a laboratory for the change that it wants to prosecute across the economy, from Silicon Valley to Dallas, Texas, in all of the big cities and small towns where bloat drags us down.
“I don’t think Ramp is going to shrink as a company,” he said. “We will just be able to do a lot more, faster. It won’t take another 140 years to build AmEx. We can do it faster, with fewer people, doing more than AmEx is able to do.”
Similarly, applying tools like Ramp, he believes, “won’t make organizations not want to grow; but it will make the productivity of each additional person a lot higher.”
If Ramp can keep fighting time within Ramp and winning, the plan is to ship products at high velocity to help all of the other companies, and the whole economy, fight time and win, too.
Financial success compounds. We have seen that throughout this Deep Dive. It is how we started the Deep Dive. Two companies, growing at different rates, end up in vastly different places over time. Ramp is a real-time case study.
I think the gap is even wider than it appears, and that that will become evident in the months and years ahead.
The reason is that capabilities compound, too. Ramp has built, and continues to build, a suite of products that save customers time and money. It is the company’s founding bet, its raison d’etre.
And now, as it incorporates AI into more and more of its products, it is in the right place and right time to save companies so much time and money that it would be fiduciarily irresponsible not to use Ramp.
One reason is obvious: if Ramp continues to save companies more time and more money, not using Ramp is like lighting time and money on fire. It’s even worse if your competitors are using Ramp. Ramp wants to do to them what it’s doing to itself: using software and talented people to make them incredibly productive at any scale.
The other reason is less obvious, and it has to do with the nature of time.
Time, Einstein tells us, is not absolute. It is relative.
Time was a different thing in the 1980s. On a Saturday morning in the ‘80s, no one could call you. Time was different even five years ago.
“Most businesses don’t have real-time visibility into their finances,” Karim told me, when I asked him when it will become ridiculously irresponsible for companies not to use Ramp. They’ve been OK waiting for month-end close to understand their financials. “They’ve gotten away with it because the world moved a little more slowly. A view of finances that’s a month or two old has been fine, because it’s taken three to six months to change something anyway.”
“Now,” he said, “the world is moving faster and faster. Switching costs are going down. Coordination costs are going down. If your business moves like a massive cruise ship, that was fine in the old world. It’s not anymore.”
“If you want a real-time, to-the-minute view of your finances, the only way to do that is by using Ramp, and generating live balance sheets and cash flow statements.”
That sounds like exactly the type of thing a co-founder of a company would say about his company’s product, but it’s also how he’s running his own company. Karim is as paranoid about this stuff as he believes others should be.
I asked the other people I spoke with a similar question: when does it become irresponsible not to use Ramp?
There are things that the company needs to build.
Calvin pointed to improvements coming in procurement for non-tech businesses.
Eric said that Ramp will need to keep expanding internationally. “Ramp works basically everywhere. We have more than eighty countries with Ramp cardholders, and every month people are spending with Ramp in every country except sanctioned ones,” he said. “We’ve started issuing cards in other currencies, and we’re onboarding Canadian companies.”
To serve multinational companies, and uninational companies in the world’s many markets, to begin to add to its near-zero international market share, it will need to grow its footprint as rapidly as its product suite.
But, maybe predictably at this point in the Deep Dive, the most common answer I heard is that it’s already a no-brainer; that actually doing the legwork to sign up all of the customers who could benefit from switching to Ramp, many of whom are under long contracts with other card companies, will just take time.
“One enterprise wanted to sign a fifteen year agreement with us,” Eric said, “which leads me to believe that they’re used to fifteen year agreements with other companies. Some of our adoption will just come from waiting for those fifteen year agreements to expire.”
“The biggest thing we’re fighting right now,” he said, “is inertia. Our win rate in head-to-head deals when a customer makes a switch is high. When we lose, it’s most often due to a ‘no decision’ or ‘seems cool, we’ll come back when we’re ready to switch.’”
Ramp needs to grow awareness. More direct mailers, events, TV ads, Deep Dives, and, most importantly, word-of-mouth. These things take time.
Ramp still isn’t in every conversation when large companies are thinking about going with the brands they’ve used forever, like AmEx and Chase. But for newer vintages, the percentage of companies talking to Ramp is growing.
“If you win 20% of new cohorts, it might not look obvious to people how much of this is happening,” Eric said. “It takes years to show up.”
All of which is to say, at this point in Ramp’s journey, getting really big, doing $1 billion of revenue in a month, and then in a week, and then maybe even faster, is just a matter of time.
Job’s not finished.
Thanks to Eric, Karim, Calvin, Lindsay, Fax, Will, Amin, Logan, Roy, John, and the Ramp team for your time and insights.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
B2B company list consists of ~100 public companies in the Meritech Software index. Ramp, Crowdstrike and Snowflake using run-rate revenue; Applovin using both LTM revenue and FY revenue from publicly available financials, with FF extrapolation. Criteria for inclusion on page - crossing both $500M and $1B revenue thresholds with at least 70% y/y growth rate, with minimum 25% revenue CAGR from 2022-2025E (to control for anomalous Covid growth pull-forward)
2025-09-05 20:50:07
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 160th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Packy here, filling in for Dan who is trapped under a mountain of creatine gummy orders. Your humble Dose writer vaguely told Bloomberg this week that the company is going do somewhere between $40-80 million in revenue this year, so if you notice a lot more fit, healthy people walking around than usual, you know why.
Fortunately, he left me a good week (it’s always a good week for the optimists). We have epigenetic atlases, brain pills, Stripe blockchains, fast space internet, Polymarket in the USA, and a great profile on the greatest player in the NFL.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) How ageing changes our genes — huge epigenetic atlas gives clearest picture yet
Chris Simms for Nature (discovered via Vittorio)
Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia published a preprint of a meta-analysis mapping how DNA methylation shifts with age across 17 human tissues (15k+ samples). The work surfaces shared and tissue-specific “aging signatures” and points to drug and reprogramming targets.
The epigenome sits above the genes and turn them on and off without altering the underlying DNA itself, often via chemical tags (methylation). Our genes stay the same with age, but their expression settings, regulated by the epigenome, shift. Mapping those shifts, tissue by tissue, could point to ways to slow or even reverse aspects of aging.
My eyes perked up when I saw this study after listening to Dwarkesh Patel’s conversation with aging company NewLimit CEO Jacob Kimmel a couple of weeks ago. In the conversation, which is a must-listen, Kimmel talks about the company’s bet that transcription factors can remodel the epigenome to make old cells function like new ones.
Even with a good map, it’s going to be a while before we (read: people much, much smarter than me) figure how to reprogram the epigenome, but luckily, if it works, we got all the time in the world.
(2) Could a Pill Fix the Brain?
Rachel E. Gross for The New York Times
The period of initial plasticity following a stroke, he realized, was being cut short by CCR5. Like a dam closing, the receptor seemed to tell the brain: Enough. Let’s lock in what we’ve learned, and call it a day. Maybe this was why stroke survivors rarely fully recovered: The brain was holding itself back.
Stroke, according to neurologist and editor in chief of the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases Fernando Testai, “was often seen as a disease of ‘diagnose and adios.’” No clear path to recovery. No medical tools or therapies. Just rehab and hope.
In 1928, Dr. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the leading neurologists of the day, said that in the adult brain, “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.”
Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, the head of neurology at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, though, saw just enough recovery in his patients to believe that brain regeneration was possible. So against the advice of his thesis advisers, “he set out to discover whether the brain could repair itself. What he learned would astonish the field: After injury, healthy neurons far from the site of damage sprouted new axons, the rootlike tentacles that conduct electrical signals.”
Strokes kill a part of the brain, and they cut off the network of neurons that communicate with far-off regions. But strokes also set off “a wave of plasticity and growth throughout the brain, an event previously thought to occur only in development. Neurons come alive again, sprouting new rootlets that poke their way into gray matter and try to re-establish lost connections.”
At some point, though, the plasticity stops. The brain ceases rewiring itself. What it, Dr. Carmichael wondered, you could extend that window?
His attempt to answer that question spanned mouse research right at UCLA, where they found that smart mice were missing a gene for a receptor called CC5, which suppresses plasticity, to a lab at Tel Aviv University, where they studied stroke patients, including Ashkenazi Jews, who have the same mutation as the smart mice. Turns out, those with the CC5 mutation “had better language, memory and attention scores.”
Even wilder, they had a drug that mimicked the mutation: an HIV treatment approved by the FDA in 2007 called Maraviroc. “As it turned out, the CCR5 receptor was also known as the portal that H.I.V. binds to in order to enter cells.”
Maraviroc isn’t perfect, and the search is on for better drugs, but it shows that recovery after stroke is possible. And it gives patients like Debra McVean, left paralyzed by a 2024 stroke, hope. Currently in a double-blind trial (she doesn’t know if she actually received Maraviroc yet), McVean can now lift her arms and wiggle her fingers.
We’re very early in understanding our own brains. I’m excited to see progress in how they recover after strokes, but also what we can do with extended plasticity windows in healthy patients. Mindblowing stuff.
(3) Tempo: The Blockchain Designed for Payments
As such, we decided to incubate Tempo, a new blockchain, in partnership with Paradigm. We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications.
Stripe doesn’t mess around.
Over the past year or so, we’ve covered Stripe’s re-entry into crypto.
Last April, John Collison gave a presentation at Stripe Sessions in which he said the future of payments was stablecoins.
In October, it acquired Not Boring Capital Portfolio company Bridge, the leading stablecoin infrastructure company, and Patrick Collison tweeted: “Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years.”
In May, Not Boring favorite Ramp announced it was working with Stripe and Bridge to launch stablecoin-backed cards.
A couple months ago, in June, Stripe acquired wallet infrastructure company Privy.
And now, Stripe has teamed up with crypto fund Paradigm, run by Stripe Board Member Matt Huang, to launch Tempo, a new L1 blockchain designed for payments, specifically stablecoin payments. Stripe being Stripe, its bringing big partners to the chain: “Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa, and more.”
Crypto is in a very odd spot right now. The regulatory overhang has basically disappeared (see more below), but excitement around new projects seems even lower than it was during the 2022-2023 bear market. On the other hand, it’s working. Bitcoin is doing what it’s supposed to do, prediction markets are real, and stablecoins really do seem like they’re going to be a big part of the way money moves going forward. With Stripe putting even more muscle behind them, the future of money is onchain.
(4) Amazon Project Kuiper Delivers Gigabit Speeds from Orbit
Panos Panay at Amazon (discovered via Christian Keil)
SpaceX has the largest constellation of internet satellites, but it no longer has the fastest.
Amazon’s Panos Panay posted a video to LinkedIn (of all places) showing Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites delivering over 1 Gbps internet. Starlink offers up to 500 Mbps, although it’s planning to launch a faster Gigabit tier through an upgraded enterprise dish.
As Christian Keil tweeted, “In an alternate history with no Starlink, we would all be losing our minds at how cool Amazon Kuiper is.”
There are a few stages in any sci-fi technology. First, it’s imagined, then it’s proven possible at small scale, then it becomes widely available, then there’s competition.
Starlink has made satellite internet widely available, which is incredible. But I think the competition phase is just as cool: it means that we’ve moved past the point of being awed by a new capability, that it’s become so routine that we begin being able to compare one service to another.
This is how technology diffuses and price comes down and it becomes even more incredible to be a human.
(5) Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the USA by the CFTC
Shayne Coplan
Ten months ago, the FBI raided Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan’s apartment in what it called a court-authorized search tied to a criminal probe around whether Polymarket violated a prior CFTC settlement by allowing U.S. users to bet on the platform. Polymarket called it “political retribution” after it took center stage during the 2024 Presidential Election.
Tomato, tomato. On Wednesday, the CFTC issued a No-Action Letter on event contracts, giving Polymarket the “green light to go live in the USA.”
I’m a big fan of prediction markets, as I’ve written about. When I hear a rumor or want to understand how seriously to take something, I go to Polymarket to understand if the market is putting their money where peoples’ mouths are. More liquidity, which the American market can certainly provide, can bring markets closer to the truth.
I also just like to see Polymarket win after its rival, Kalshi, allegedly paid influencers to tweet negative things about Polymarket after the FBI raid. Relatedly, William LeGate, who now leads growth at Polymarket, tweeted: “When I joined Kalshi a year ago today, [Kalshi CEO] Tarek made their mission clear: ‘copy everything Polymarket does… our moat is regulatory capture.’ Today, that moat no longer exists.”
LeGate works at Polymarket now, so caveat emptor, but the result is the same: the playing field has been evened. Let the best prediction market win.
Bonus: Saquon Barkley is Playing for Equity
Polina Pompliano for The Profile
The NFL is BACK! In celebration of its return and the Eagles’ win last night over the Cowboys, I couldn’t not share this excellent profile on my favorite player, Ramp co-investor, and last night touchdown-scorer, Saquon Barkley.
For those who missed the awed tweets, Polina shared Saquon’s venture portfolio:
The high-growth startups in his portfolio include Anthropic (currently valued at $183 billion), Anduril ($30.5 billion), Ramp ($22.5 billion), Cognition ($9.8 billion), Neuralink ($9 billion), Strike (~$1 billion), and Polymarket (~$1 billion). He’s also a limited partner in funds including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Silver Point Capital, and Multicoin Capital.
The whole thing is worth a read.
Saquon is destined for greatness on and off the field. Go Birds.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring. Go get your company a voice to welcome WorkOS to the Dose!
We’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-08-29 20:37:36
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 159th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This is always the saddest weekend of the year for me. Last real weekend of summer. Time to pack away the sunshine and drag yourself back to real life come Tuesday at 9am sharp. But if you need a little lift, you’re in the right place. We’ve got five (plus a couple bonus) stories of good news to carry you through.
Let’s get to it.
AI is calling. Ring ring. Hello? It's Bland, the literal voice behind Fortune 500s.
Heard of Bland yet? It’s the world’s most powerful AI phone-calling agent. Chances are, you’ve already spoken to it without even noticing.
Enterprises are using it to handle millions of calls, texts, and webchat interactions 24/7 – all while perfectly representing their brand. From a single dashboard you can:
Build agents with any voice and personality, for any possible use case. Just define guardrails to control its behavior and plug in any of your external tools. Done.
Deploy your brand’s AI across every department from sales to operations to support with a single click. It will dynamically respond to any caller’s language, self-improve, and scale infinitely.
Track performance of campaigns, extract data, and watch it score a higher CSAT than human reps* – all while slashing costs.
Pretty wild, huh? Here, give it a call yourself.
Or Not Boring readers can get exclusive access to an even more advanced version here.
(1) Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married
From Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on Instagram
We love love here at Not Boring. So if you thought we were going to ignore the biggest event in love history just because it’s not technically technological, think again.
As new Swifties (after her appearance on New Heights - way cooler than expected!), we expect that with their nuptials and inevitable pregnancy (Polymarket has 2025 pregnancy odds at 12%; someone needs to bid it up to 13% asap for the brand), Traylor Swelce will save the nuclear family in America and ignite a Baby Boom that will create a future generation of NeoBoomers that dwarfs the Boomer generation in sheer mass. As Eagles fans, we’re just excited that Travis Kelce is going to spend the season incredibly distracted.
And if you’re mad at us for using one of our Blank Spaces to talk about Traylor Swelce in the Dose… Shake It Off. You Need to Calm Down. No Bad Blood. Don’t Blame Me. Shake It Off.
It’s a Love Story, baby just say yes.
(2) SpaceX pulls off Starship rocket launch in much-needed comeback
Georgina Rannard for The BBC
SpaceX has pulled off a successful test flight of its newest generation rocket Starship, reversing a trend of disappointing failures.
Tenth time’s a charm.
SpaceX completed a fully successful Starship test flight, achieving every major milestone it set for the mission. The previous nine attempts were each remarkable feats of engineering (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and pushed the program forward, but none managed to check every box. Flight 10 changed that.
The launch demonstrated the ability to restart engines in orbit, deploy a payload of eight Starlink satellites, survive the heat and stress of reentry, and move a step closer to full reusability. Both the booster and the ship splashed down successfully, making it the first time the entire system completed its planned profile.
The next step is Flight 11, projected for later this year. That flight is expected to take Starship to a true orbital trajectory and attempt a(nother) dramatic “chopstick” catch. And who doesn’t love a good chopstick catch? Nothing more American than a chopstick catch.
If successful, it will bring SpaceX closer to its vision of a fully reusable launch system and get Elon closer to his vision of colonizing Mars and making civilization multi-planetary. And if not, SpaceX will learn, iterate, and get ‘em on Flight 12.
(3) Children with rare genetic diseases get CRISPR Cures center
From Nature
A new center in San Francisco will offer tailor-made CRISPR therapies to cure children with rare diseases. The Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures, announced in June, brings together pediatrician Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley. The new center builds on the successful treatment whereby baby KJ was cured of a rare and life-threatening metabolic disorder caused by carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency using a personalized CRISPR therapy.
The next time you are mindlessly scrolling IG Reels and feel that deep pit of worthlessness and despair, take solace in the fact that in doing so, you are funding the development of bespoke CRISPR therapies for babies with rare diseases.
Priscilla Chan, wife of Mark Zuckerberg and co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, donated $20M to launch The Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures in San Francisco. The goal is to make custom CRISPR therapies for rare genetic diseases quick, affordable, and widely available.
The Center builds on the landmark Baby KJ case, in which researchers delivered a bespoke gene edit that cured a deadly metabolic disorder, proving that one-off genetic cures are possible. That breakthrough now serves as a blueprint for developing and standardizing personalized CRISPR-based treatments. By establishing a repeatable process, the Center aims to dramatically lower costs, shorten development timelines, and extend lifesaving therapies to children with thousands of rare mutations that currently have no treatment options.
And all you gotta do to make this possible is keep scrolling.
(4) Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model
From Google
Today, we’re excited to introduce Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano-banana), our state-of-the-art image generation and editing model. This update enables you to blend multiple images into a single image, maintain character consistency for rich storytelling, make targeted transformations using natural language, and use Gemini's world knowledge to generate and edit images.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: do not sleep on Google DeepMind.
This week Google rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, codenamed “Nano Banana,” a model built for advanced image generation and multi-step editing. It lets users add, remove, or merge elements while keeping faces and objects consistent, a challenge that has tripped up most AI systems. It’s like a natural language–driven Photoshop that anyone can use with just their words.
Nano Banana is built directly into the Gemini app and available to both free and paid users, a sign of how aggressively Google is pushing to make AI tools mainstream. Developers also get access through the Gemini API and Vertex AI, so we expect to see the banana showing up in all sorts of apps in the coming months.
The move puts pressure on competitors like OpenAI and Midjourney, showing that Google can ship cutting-edge models and distribute them at massive scale essentially overnight. That’s a good thing for consumers and a challenge for every other AI lab.
(5) Base Power x Abundance Institute
From The Abundance Institute
By making power more affordable and more reliable, you make peoples’ lives better.
We’re beginning to think people are making content explicitly to show up in the Dose, because Abundance Institute x Base Power Company… come on! Tailor-made Dosenip.
Base is one of our favorite companies over here at Not Boring. Packy’s written two Deep Dives on them: here and here. By installing residential batteries, Base can store energy when it’s cheap and abundant, and discharge it when it’s expensive and in high-demand. By doing that, it can help people avoid outages, lower their bills, and help balance the grid. It also helps the grid do more with the transmission it has, which is important, because it’s become incredibly slow and expensive to add more transmission.
This video, a conversation between our friends Chris Koopman and Zach Dell shot at Base HQ in Austin, TX, is a great overview about what Base does, and gives a good feel for the electric vibes in the Base office.
Base is going to be one of the most important companies of this generation. You heard it here first.
Bonus: Electric Slide
Packy here. On Tuesday, I shared my longest and most deeply-researched essay ever: The Electric Slide.
I wasn’t sure how people would feel about a 40,000 word essay, but as I started writing it, I kept realizing that I didn’t quite understand certain things about the history or physics of the Electric Stack, and so I wrote down what I learned and hoped that some other people would want to work their way all the way up from the basics, too.
Turns out, The Electric Slide is on its way to becoming the most popular essay in Not Boring history. It’s already the most liked and most shared of anything I’ve written, and the feedback has been way better than I expected. Some people have even read the whole thing. It’s been very cool to see.
I think that the electrification of everything is going to be at least as important as AI, and that without the Electric Stack, AI will be stuck in our computers, unable to fulfill its boosters’ most optimistic visions. I also believe that America (and our friends) needs to reconsider its priorities: we need to get more serious about building the Electric Stack and the products built on top of it, because they will be better, faster, and cheaper than what’s come before. The fact that the components of the Stack are 99% cheaper than they were in 1990 and still dropping makes that inevitable.
If you have some time this weekend, grab a coffee and a comfy chair and give it a read.
DOUBLE BONUS: Cyan Banister - A Fool’s Dérive - Dialectic
Packy again. Honestly we owe you an extra for that Traylor Swelce stuff.
Luckily, Jackson Dahl has been on fire with Dialectic. He’s on one of those runs where you’re like “ok there’s no way he’s going to top that conversation” and then he goes out and tops it. Over and over again. If you’re not listening to Dialectic yet, add it to your podcast feeds pronto.
Out of 27 excellent conversations, his recent one with Cyan Banister might be the best yet. I’ve started trying to incorporate some of the things she does into my life after listening to it. I won’t spoil it - just go listen and make your weekend a little more magical.
Have a great Labor Day weekend y’all.
Thanks to Bland for sponsoring. Go get your company a voice to welcome Bland to the Dose!
We’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday (hopefully).
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
