Packy McCormick doesn't just report on a financial milestone; he challenges the very physics of how businesses scale, arguing that Ramp has achieved the impossible by turning time into a competitive advantage. While the market obsesses over valuation multiples and fintech skepticism, McCormick presents a case where a company is doubling in size annually while simultaneously generating cash flow—a combination that defies the standard trade-off between growth and efficiency.
The Physics of Hypergrowth
McCormick frames Ramp's journey not as a lucky break, but as a deliberate engineering of velocity. He writes, "Ramp is the rare company that gets better and moves faster with time." This is a radical departure from the typical startup narrative where growth slows as the base gets larger. The author supports this by contrasting Ramp's trajectory against classical business models, noting that while most companies burn cash to buy growth, Ramp's value proposition is inherently about saving it. "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!"
This logic holds up under scrutiny because the company has managed to cross the billion-dollar revenue mark while remaining cash flow positive, a feat McCormick notes is achieved "years faster than anyone else" among comparable business-to-business firms. Critics might note that comparing private valuations to public market multiples is inherently risky, as liquidity premiums and market sentiment can distort pricing. However, McCormick counters this by highlighting the company's ability to raise capital at increasingly rational multiples as revenue scales, suggesting the market is beginning to price in the durability of their model.
"Ramp is a business focused on saving time that gets better with time."
The Strategy of Time
The core of McCormick's argument shifts from financial metrics to a philosophical observation about the nature of time itself. He suggests that Ramp's founders, Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, built a company where the goal was to compress the timeline of success. "The business started as a brainstorm about time to money," he explains, detailing their ambition to reach a billion-dollar valuation in 18 months—a timeline previously thought impossible for a New York City company. Instead of viewing the 2022 market downturn as a crisis, the company treated it as a stress test for their inputs. "Get the inputs right, and the outputs follow, in time," McCormick writes, quoting the philosophy of Bill Walsh.
This reframing is powerful because it moves the conversation away from the volatility of the venture capital cycle and toward the operational reality of the business. The author points out that even as valuations fluctuated, the underlying revenue engine accelerated, growing from $10 million to $1 billion in just six years. He notes that the company's frequent, smaller fundraising rounds are not a sign of desperation but a strategic choice: "Instead of raising dilutive, multi-billion dollar rounds every couple of years, they raise more frequently in smaller chunks." This approach allows them to maintain momentum without the drag of massive dilution events.
The Misunderstanding of the Model
McCormick dedicates significant space to dismantling the skepticism from analysts who view Ramp merely as a fintech rather than a software company. He cites an article by Anita Ramaswamy that argued investors were overvaluing the company, then systematically deconstructs that view. "First: understanding Ramp's business model, which is evolving as it adds new products," McCormick writes, pointing out that a significant portion of their profit will soon come from high-margin software products like travel and procurement. He argues that the skepticism stems from a failure to grasp the company's trajectory: "Ramp does not expect to grow just 50% over the next year, and it certainly doesn't plan to stop growing after that."
The author's defense of the valuation relies on the premise that growth rates will continue to outpace the market's expectations. He compares the company's growth curve to solar cost curves, where "even optimistic forecasts prove not to be optimistic enough." This is a bold claim, but it is backed by the data point that Ramp is growing faster at a larger scale than ever before. A counterargument worth considering is that no company can sustain hypergrowth indefinitely, and the law of large numbers will eventually force a slowdown. Yet, McCormick's evidence suggests that Ramp has found a way to delay that inflection point by expanding its product suite and deepening its integration into customer workflows.
"The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion... Ramp, more than any other company I know, considers time's malleability."
Bottom Line
McCormick's strongest move is reframing Ramp's success not as a financial anomaly but as a mastery of time, proving that a company can scale with speed and profitability simultaneously. The argument's biggest vulnerability remains the assumption that this specific velocity can be maintained indefinitely without regulatory or market headwinds. For the investor, the critical watch item is not just the revenue number, but whether the company can continue to compress its growth timeline as it approaches the scale of legacy financial institutions.