#381 I Had Dinner With Michael Ovitz

Something that Michael Ovitz had in common with people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos is the belief that you must find and work with extraordinary people. Even when Ovitz was a young man, he starts his company, he has no money, he makes a list of people that he eventually wanted to work with, and it was the best of the best. And even though at the time, it felt like a pipe dream, he actually makes that list into a reality. And the importance of working with the very best people, there's actually a great observation about this from Steve Jobs. And he says that the key observation was that I noticed that that that dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 to one or a 100 to one. So given that, you're well advised to build a team that pursues the a plus players. That's exactly what Steve Jobs did. It's exactly what Michael Ovitz did, and it 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. So that means when your business is using Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf twenty four seven to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. Ramp invests heavily in creating new innovative products. In fact, I just, sat down with the founder and a friend of mine who's the one of the cofounders and the CEO, of Ramp named Eric, and he told me that 54% of their payroll is now dedicated to r and d. So the longer they use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. That's very important because as Sam Walton astutely pointed out in his autobiography, he wrote, 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. Ovitz knows that Ramp built a team of a plus players because Ovitz invested in Ramp. So from a customer's perspective, what does a team of a plus players sounds like? 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. So take the time, set up a demo of the product, and you'll see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on Ramp. You can do that by going to ramp.com. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. Okay. So last week, I flew to New York to have dinner with Mike Ovitz. We wound up having a …