#373 Breakfast with Brad Jacobs + How To Make A Few Billion Dollars

One of the most important things I learned from Brad's book, and we spoke about this when I had breakfast with Brad as well, was the importance of working with the smartest and most talented people that you can. Brad says that the most important thing that a CEO does is recruit superlative people. And Brad will recruit the smartest people he can find. And he actually talks about this. Brad says there's no substitute for smarts. And that reminded me of something that Steve Jobs said in this interview I read that Steve gave in the late nineteen nineties. And this is what Steve said. I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or a 100 to one. Given that you are well advised to go after the cream of the cream, You need to build a team that pursues the a plus players. And this is exactly what ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at ramp is nearly impossible. In the last twelve months, they hired only point 23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf twenty four seven to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. And all of this happens on a single platform. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. And this is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added. He said a small team of a plus players can run circles around a giant team of b and c players. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of a plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check-in on because they have it handled. Ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all of your financial operations, all on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. So I want to tell you what I learned when I had the opportunity to have a two hour breakfast …